Before cops buy more Tasers, the chief promised to screen a “gimmick” — video from the stun guns.
Chief James M. Lewis made the invitation Wednesday night to members of the Board of Aldermen’s Public Safety Committee, after taking heat for purchasing 50 new Tasers that lack video recording devices. Lewis promised a look at tapes from video-enabled Tasers that he said will expose the $600 cameras as little more than “a gimmick.”
Lewis testified along with Assistant Chief Roy Brown (left to right in photo) at the hearing at City Hall. He said he believes the public had been “sold a bill of goods” about the value of equipping the department’s Tasers with recording devices that he said recorded only poor quality videos of little use in ensuring accountability.
“I think there’s a community perception that if there’s a use of the Taser they disagree with, they can look at this tape and see what occurred and have some kind of a DVD that’s first class, and I think they’d be extremely disappointed,” he said. “They call it a low-light camera, but it has no lighting system on it, so you couldn’t pick someone out of a lineup off of that.”
Although the camera begins recording as soon as the Taser is switched on by the officer, Lewis said, the tapes he had seen did not capture what happened before the weapon was discharged, only the immediate aftermath.
“If the officer pulls out the Taser to use it, the best you’re going to get is maybe a shot of his feet,” he said. “You don’t get anything before.”
The mounted cameras also record audio. Lewis said that function could be accomplished just as well with a “$25 tape recorder.”
The cameras roughly double the cost of the basic Taser model, which he said already includes time-stamp software that “records the exact time it was fired, and how long.”
“That’s the really valuable tool,” he said.
Committee Chairman Alexander Rhodeen, a Fair Haven Heights alderman, was absent from the meeting for Army Reserves training. But in a letter to the chief he expressed disappointment at learning about the department’s purchase of the camera-free Tasers in the newspaper. He said the decision failed to live up to the expectations of the Deadly Force Task Force that recommended the purchase of Tasers beginning in 2007.
The decision to buy Tasers was a contentious one in town. Advocates said the stun guns can save officers’ and targets’ lives. Opponents argued that officers with Tasers use them when they otherwise wouldn’t shoot, and that contrary to popular perception the stuns can kill.
The final approval was a compromise, with the camera component meant to reassure skeptics. Since then cops have begun using Tasers with increasing frequency.
Rhodeen has backed the chief’s approach to law enforcement, but he characterized the decision to bag the video cameras as out of accordance with the democratic process.
“Purchasing Tasers without proper recording equipment,” he wrote, “is unacceptable.”
Rhodeen, who noted his strong support for Tasers, said he was willing to accept slower distribution “for the sake of a verifiable record of use every time.”
“There may come a time when community support for Tasers, and the training officers receive for when to deploy them, reaches a level that the video recording becomes unnecessary,” he wrote, “but that time is not now.”
In response to the committee’s misgivings, Lewis said the department would hold off on the purchase of any more Tasers until a decision had been reached.
East Shore Alderman Alphonse Paolillo, Jr. said he had been a supporter of the Taser program from the beginning, but said he would like to see the actual footage from the recording devices before making a decision on their value. The committee agreed to request a viewing of all or some of the videos after consulting with the city’s attorneys about potential privacy issues involved.
Lewis said he had personally reviewed six of the tapes, and offered to show committee the video records of all 54 Taser uses by the department over the past years, which he said would likely amount to about three hours of footage.
The video records, he said, would show that the cameras were “not as valuable as people may think.” He said the money saved could ultimately be better spent in providing more officers on the street with the cheaper, basic-model Tasers.
Brown said Taser International had tried to sell him the cameras as well when he was chief of his own department; like Lewis he had decided they were not worth the cost. The real value, he said, was in supplying more officers with a weapon that he said resulted in “a decline in the use of batons and officers using their fists in fights with people.”
“What I do still hear in New Haven frequently,” he said, “is officers coming on the radio saying, ‘Has anybody got a Taser? Give me a Taser.’ So you’re still having lots of instances where we might be able to reduce some of this confrontation by having the Tasers on the street.”
Lewis said his long-term goal would be to equip about 400 officers with Tasers, at a total cost he estimated at $200,000. With recording devices, he said, the bill would come to over $400,000.
“If the decision is made that you’d rather spend the extra $200,000,” he said, “that really is more of a political decision.”
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From what I hear the taser is an effective way to prevent injury to both officers and arrestees. Which saves the city money in the short and long run. Besides everyone has a camera phone these days, officers are always being video taped.