Patrol deputies now carry body cameras
Sheriff ’s office also using better video storage and sharing
Last month, Hamilton County District Attorney General Neal Pinkston suggested the county’s sheriff’s office “develop a more proactive approach to reviewing and reporting potential excessive use of force” incidents.
By the end of the month and in response to questions from the Times Free Press, the sheriff’s office detailed its policy for reviewing use of force incidents, adding that, as of last summer, it has begun using its new body camera provider’s cloud storage platform, evidence.com.
Additionally, all patrol deputies — including corporals, sergeants and lieutenants — have now been outfitted with body cameras.
The cloud storage platform, sheriff’s office general counsel Coty Wamp said, makes it easier to share evidence, including documents and videos with the district attorney’s office and other attorneys.
Pinkston’s suggestion to bolster the use of force review process came in a letter to Sheriff Jim Hammond announcing Pinkston would not pursue criminal charges against five deputies shown on dash camera video repeatedly striking a Black man with batons in Ooltewah on May 23.
In that same letter, Pinkston noted it was the Hamilton County Public Defender’s Office that brought the video to his
attention, making it the second known instance in which the DA’s office was not quickly made aware by the sheriff’s office of issues surrounding dash and body camera video.
In court documents filed last year, Pinkston noted his office was not made aware of a “catastrophic data loss” that caused thousands of sheriff’s office videos to disappear — potentially jeopardizing criminal and civil cases — until over a month after it happened.
The server crash took place on Jan. 13, 2020, and spurred the sheriff’s office to seek a contract with Axon, one of the country’s largest police body camera and cloud storage providers. (The sheriff’s office has attributed the crash to the two companies it used to maintain its server. One of the companies has denied that claim.)
Nevertheless, it wasn’t until Feb. 25, 2020, that Pinkston was notified of the crash — that is, after his office began requesting more of former deputy Daniel Wilkey’s dash camera videos. Wilkey faces 44 criminal charges, including six counts of sexual battery, two counts of rape and nine counts of official oppression in connection with several allegations, including a forced baptism and a roadside body cavity search.
(Pinkston had already obtained at least 500 hours of Wilkey’s videos before the server crash.)
Now that the sheriff’s office is using Axon’s evidence storage system, Wamp said, “All video recordings, both in-car dash and body cameras, are uploaded to evidence. com and can be shared to the district attorney by the click of a button.”
That’s in contrast to last year when, at the beginning of the Wilkey criminal investigation, Pinkston said he was told “it would be another 120 to 180 days” before his office would receive Wilkey’s dash camera videos.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation completed the task in less than 24 hours, Pinkston said, though Hammond has said his staff is who showed the TBI how.
“The other way in which evidence.com has proved useful is that it allows HCSO supervisors to view these recordings at any time,” Wamp said. “In fact, supervisors are required to periodically review uploaded videos at random.”
For example, she said, “if a lieutenant is interested in an incident that involved one of his deputies, he can log on to evidence.com and view the associated dash camera or body camera footage at his leisure.
“This ensures accountability and can also be beneficial for training purposes,” Wamp said.
Asked whether steps are being taken to develop more proactive reviewing and reporting of potential excessive use of force incidents, Wamp said that “any time force is used, officers are required to complete a use-of-force report that details the incident.”
A copy of each report must then be forwarded to the internal affairs supervisor through the officer’s chain of command, she said. That means that each report — along with all other evidence involved — is reviewed by a deputy’s immediate supervisor and is then sent to internal affairs.
Additionally, the sheriff ’s office training division and leadership have identified areas of improvement in its use-of-force applications, Chief Deputy Austin Garrett said at the time Pinkston cleared the deputies of criminal liability in the May 23 case.
That training has already been included in the department’s 2021 mandatory in-service training, Garrett said.