Good cop cameras, bad rules
Last summer, the NYPD asked New Yorkers what rules should apply to the body-worn cameras that police will soon begin wearing. The response was overwhelming: More than 25,000 people responded to the department’s survey. The community asked for policies that would make the camera program more transparent, so that the footage can make cops more accountable to the people.
Last week, the NYPD announced its new body-worn camera policy. Turns out, the NYPD isn’t actually that interested in what the public thinks.
More than six out of 10 (64%) of the New Yorkers who replied to its survey favored officers recording “all interactions with members of the public.” That’s a good idea. If officers are required to have their cameras on, then when a situation suddenly escalates, cameras will already be rolling. But the NYPD discounted this concern. The new policy lets officers decide, in many situations, whether and when to turn their cameras on.
The public overwhelmingly agreed that the NYPD should be required to show people the footage of their own encounters with police officers upon request. This is especially important for people who may be filing police misconduct complaints. Leading departments around the country — from Washington to Las Vegas — have established simple, streamlined processes that allow recorded individuals to view footage at district stations.
But the NYPD is refusing to take this step. Instead, it will require footage requesters go through the slow and ill-suited Freedom of Information Law public records process — the same one you’d have to use to get, say, the mayor’s travel records.
To date, when people have used the FOIL process to request footage from the tiny number of body cameras already deployed in an experiment, the NYPD has stood in the way, charging the public exorbitant fees and claiming broad exemptions. In order for body-worn cameras to provide even basic transparency or accountability, the department must do more.
Sixty-eight percent of respondents said that in use-of-force cases, officers should always be required to give a statement before they watch the body camera footage. Videos may show a limited perspective of what actually happened, and can often be interpreted in different ways. Research has shown that watching videos of an event will skew people’s memories of what happened.
These concerns are particularly important in cases where an officer uses force: In the worst cases, officers could easily fit their statements to how the video makes things look, rather than reporting what they really saw. Yet despite the overwhelming public opposition, no change will be made to this part of the policy. This decision is likely to diminish the community’s trust in the department’s actions, which is exactly the opposite effect that cameras are supposed to have.
Looking to the future, there’s another big concern: Leading camera vendors, like Taser and VIEVU (which provides cameras to the NYPD), are working to build face recognition and other biometric tools into their systems.
When they gain these powerful capabilities, body cameras will turn into potential systems of mass surveillance, scanning the face of everyone who walks by. As such, many urged the NYPD to explicitly commit to limiting its future use of this invasive, constitutionally questionable technology together with cameras. But the department brushed off these concerns.
Yet despite all these problems, the federal monitor, Peter Zimroth, who was assigned to oversee the department’s reform measures signed off Tuesday on the new policies without insisting on any changes.
Body-worn cameras are potent tools. When used properly, they can shed light on the critical moments before a fatal police shooting, allowing the public to better evaluate whether lethal force was justified. They can also help make police more accountable and transparent in a range of other situations.
But the policies that the NYPD is putting into place risk turning these cameras from tools of accountability into something else entirely. Going forward, as body cameras grow from a small pilot to a citywide program, New Yorkers must have more meaningful say in how the body-worn cameras will roll out. And the police should include policy safeguards that are missing from this stillearly version of the program.
If the NYPD truly wants to improve relations with the residents of New York, it should listen to what the public has to say.