City council urges police to add bodycams by 2025

Police board planning a trial project next year

Vancouver council wants all 800 patrol officers on the city police force equipped with body cameras by 2025, saying it would improve transparency and accountability.

But an expert said cameras are not the answer to reducing the number of violent conflicts between police and members of the public.

“People are seduced by the idea that camera technology is going to reduce police use of force because officers are going to be less likely to be engaged in violent activity and there will be fewer public complaints because people are more likely to listen to police commands and to do what they're told,” professor Christopher Schneider of Brandon University said.

But, he said several studies on the subject have found “the evidence that they work are inconclusive.” There are “far more questions than answers” about whether cameras increase transparency and accountability of police and whether they are a good return on investment for public safety, said Schneider, who has written extensively on police and body cams.

Vancouver council passed its resolution on Wednesday, calling cameras “timely and warranted” based on what it said was an “extensive body of academic research” on body cameras shown to “decrease the number of public complaints against police as well as to decrease the use of force by police officers.”

Council will send a letter to the police board, union and solicitor general indicating support for the bodycams and ask city staff to estimate the cost to implement and operate the cameras, software and storage, in a report by 2024.

The police board has the jurisdiction to decide whether VPD officers will wear cameras, and for now has agreed only to provide the police with $200,000 for a bodycam pilot project next year, board vice-chair Faye Wightman said.

She said that decision was made before the current council was elected in October and the request for funds still has to be approved by city council.

The board would consider input from council after it sees the results of the pilot, she said. The board has to assess what effect the use of cameras has on police interactions, what it would cost, and whether it was cost-effective, she said.

And the police board is required by the provincial solicitor general to conduct a privacy impact assessment before issuing bodycams.

Schneider and Meghan McDermott, policy director at the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, shared concerns about privacy.

“There is a concern of about the taking and collecting and storing information about us, that it can be vacuumed up and collected by the state,” she said.

She said police being able to record events, such as legitimate protests, may have a chilling effect on those in attendance.

She said any bodycam program should be conducted under strict policy guidelines from the solicitor general's office, governing when police can start and stop recording and how the data is to be handled.

“Privacy concerns are not usually well considered by police because they're usually more concerned about police operations,” she said.

The privacy assessment should be done transparently so the public understands the ramifications of the use of bodycams.

Solicitor general Mike Farnworth's office was asked to comment, but did not reply by deadline.

“Research on police body-worn cameras is in its early stages and without definitive results,” according to a recent report on the website of the Better Canada Institute, a public-policy think-tank. “The research performed on police body-worn cameras is limited to the U.S., which can distort the perceived benefits and drawbacks of body cameras in Canada if research is not adequately contextualized. The rising implementation of body-worn cameras in Canadian cities will help further understand this technology and its impact on policing.

“Given how new the technology is and its limited implementation, these benefits need to be considered in tandem with several more negative factors, including implicit biases in interpreting ambiguous video footage, privacy concerns, technical issues, and high implementation costs.”

A RCMP bodycam pilot in Iqaluit in 2020-21 found about 70 per cent of respondents to a survey say the cameras increased their trust in the police and that it helped police become more transparent. More than 60 per cent said it increased public safety and improved the relationship between police and community.