Battle over police body cameras
Protests heat up in Portland, Ore., over a proposal to let police see footage before writing their reports.
Demonstrators in Portland, Ore., whose clash with officers last week led to a shutdown of City Hall, are vowing to amp up protests over new policing rules they say give officers too much leeway in investigations of police misconduct.
As cities across the country debate whether police officers should wear body cameras, the conflict in Portland centers on how and when officers have access to video from such cameras. Proposed rules would give officers the right to review body camera footage before writing incident reports in all cases except fatal shootings.
Portland officials say the rules are not final and still subject to public input, but civil rights groups say the rules are well on their way to being finalized. Activists fear the rules would allow officers an unjust advantage over other witnesses and invite abuse by giving police the opportunity to taper their accounts to conform with video footage.
Greg McKelvey, a spokesman for Don’t Shoot Portland, which has battled with city officials over police policies, said accountability has long been a problem for the Police Department. “We wanted more,” he said. “They gave us less.”
The debate over body camera videos is tied to a separate but related issue concerning a new contract between the city and the police union, the Portland Police Assn. The video policy is not part of the contract but has been under discussion by the city and union, so when the City Council met Wednesday to approve the latest version of the contract, protesters descended on City Hall.
Police in riot gear peppersprayed demonstrators who blocked streets in front of City Hall, crippling parts of the city’s light rail and bus systems. Police said that they were attacked with “projectiles” and that one officer was assaulted. Ten protesters were arrested.
McKelvey said several demonstrators were injured as police forced them out of City Hall after the council meeting was moved to a private room in response to protesters’ disruption. “I saw people hit with sticks,” he said. “Many of us were pepper-sprayed. There are a lot of people with black eyes.”
Mayor Charlie Hales declined to be interviewed but said in a statement that he supported the new contract because it would help the Police Department fill its 83 vacancies.
The statement said the new contract, which the council approved 3 to 1, requires the union to drop several grievances against the city, raises officer salaries to improve recruiting, and eliminates a rule that gives officers 48 hours before they can be questioned after shootings.
“Portland’s labor agreement with our police union will not only address our police staffing crisis, it reinforces a modern police bureau of accountability and transparency that fully represents our community,” it said.
Though the new contract has been approved, the debate over the body camera policy is likely to continue for some time. Portland police don’t currently wear body cameras, but Hales has said he expects them to start sometime next year.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People have come out against the draft rules on body cameras.
“Why would police need to see video before writing a report unless they need to make their report match what’s on the videotape — and possibly omit actions that weren’t caught on camera?” Jo Ann Hardesty, president of the local NAACP, recently wrote in the Oregonian newspaper.
In a letter to Hales this month, ACLU Legislative Director Kimberly McCullough said she believed the decision over body camera policy had already been settled without sufficient public input.
The proposed camera rules are referenced in a document, developed by the city and union, outlining a variety of police practices. The ACLU and other activists say that, as worded, the document suggests the camera rule is a done deal.
The “policy is deeply troubling as drafted and reflects a lack of commitment to the use of body cameras as a tool for accountability .... Portland Police Association and Portland Police Bureau are given too much power in the process of further policy development,” McCullough’s letter said.
Mayoral spokesman Brian Worley said the camera rules were not final and can still be changed.
The role of police union contracts has increasingly become a focal point of growing efforts to reduce abuses by police, said Max Schanzenbach, a law professor at Northwestern University who studies policing.
Schanzenbach said that while “pre-review of video is quite common,” it has recently come under scrutiny as more police departments require officers to wear body cameras.
“Pre-review undermines the investigator’s powers,” he said. “The ironic thing is that police use the tactic protesters are asking for in their own investigation of criminals. They don’t reveal what evidence they have as they began their interrogations; they try to compare what they know from video evidence or other testimony to what you tell them without that information. But they prefer to not have the same rules for themselves.”
This is not the first time Portland police have come under fire.
A 2012 investigation by the U.S. Justice Department found Portland police were using excessive force against people with mental illness and were too quick to use Tasers.
Portland police have also long been accused of disproportionately targeting black residents. African American residents make up 6.3% of the population but account for 12.8% of police stops, according to police data released last year. Black motorists who were stopped were twice as likely as whites to have their cars searched.