Chief: Cop Body Cams Coming

As President Obama pushes outfitting cops nationwide with body cameras, New Haven is preparing to roll out its own camera program, possibly as soon as the first quarter of 2015.

But the city isn’t outfitting officers with body cameras because the president announced this week that he wants to pump $263 million into state and local law enforcement agencies to purchase the cameras, expand training and add more resources for police department reform. Obama’s announcement came in the wake of controversy in Ferguson, Missouri over a police officer shooting and killing an unarmed teenager.

New Haven already had a body-camera plan in the works. Details of the plan are the subject of current negotiations between police brass and the police union.

Body cameras — in some cases no bigger than a police officer’s badge and worn clipped to the front of a uniform — would benefit police officers and citizens alike, said Chief Dean Esserman. Proponents of the small digital cameras say both officers and citizens are more likely to respond in less aggressive ways when they know their actions are being recorded, possibly preventing future Fergusons.

The cameras also have their skeptics, some of whose arguments can be found in this Atlantic article.

And advocates for overhauling how certain communities are policed, particularly black and brown communities, argue that video evidence won’t matter if grand juries are unwilling to prosecute officers. Grand juries have declined to indict officers in cases involving the shootings of unarmed black men in Ohio, Missouri and most recently New York.

Esserman said he absolutely would go after any state and federal money to defray the costs of bringing the cameras to New Haven. But he said that won’t alter the slow, methodical way New Haven is approaching the introduction of body cameras.

“I am a big believer in other people’s buck but our bang,” he said. ​“We pursue federal money vigorously around here and we’re pretty good at it.”

A Lot Of What-Ifs

Esserman said his optimistic estimate is that body cameras could make their debut as early as March 2015 to be worn by the then-graduating class of recruits. Senior officers would have the option of volunteering to wear the cameras.

“A lot of what-ifs” remain to be worked out, said union President Louis Cavaliere Jr.

Cavaliere said if he were still a cop on the street, he’d personally want a body camera, but not every cop feels the same way. He said he certainly wouldn’t want a camera on during an entire eight-hour shift.

“There should be an expectation of some privacy,” he said. ​“What about if you’re on the phone with your doctor, or your spouse? What about when you go to the bathroom?”

He said he sees an advantage to the cameras for officers, particularly if someone ever alleges misconduct.

“Nothing makes a cop more pissed than to have it alleged that he is a liar, or a thief, or that he said something he never said,” Cavaliere said. ​“A video would definitely end that argument. And if a civilian is lying about something, I asked the chief if we were going to go after that person for falsely reporting an incident, and he said that he would be 100 percent behind that.”

A deeper concern for Cavaliere is how the city would pay for the cameras and their upkeep. In addition to the equipment purchase, he said, the department would need storage for the video files. He said they’d likely need an officer dedicated to handling Freedom of Information requests and regular maintenance.

“We are talking seven or eight hours times 60 officers,” he said. ​“That’s every single shift, three shifts a day. Who is going to pay for all this? Will it come from the general fund, grants? Will it affect our contracts down the line? There are still a lot of open ends and a lot of financial burden. People think you just buy an $800 camera and away you go, but there are a lot of parts to the system that are not being considered.”

Cavaliere gave credit to Esserman: ​“This administration is taking all of these questions into heavy consideration.” He said the talks are ongoing and all parties are trying to arrange a meeting with an expert who has helped other departments in the state implement their camera programs.

Esserman said that it’s not a matter of if the body cameras are coming, but when.

“I believe body cameras are important,” he said. ​“I also think it is just as important to be in partnership with the union to introduce them. If I had the money tomorrow and could turn the cameras on by Monday, I don’t think it would be the right way to get there. Getting there fast isn’t the best way to get there. It’s more important to get there together.”

Doing It Right

In the wake of the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, President Barack Obama has proposed using $75 million of ​“an investment package” to pay for a body camera partnership program that would provide a 50 percent match to state and local law enforcement agencies to purchase body cameras and data storage. The White House estimates that over three years the program could aid the purchase and up keep of 50,000 body cameras, which can cost as much as $1,000 per camera.

Esserman (pictured) said long before Ferguson or any of the intense national scrutiny of police officers involved in unarmed shootings, he had spoken with the police union about introducing body cameras. Those talks, which started back in the summer of 2013, have included bringing in police chiefs and union leaders from across the country and poring over data about the cameras and their use — data that shows that complaints against officers go down and citizen confidence goes up when body cameras are present.

The talks also included camera manufacturers. Esserman said he wants to avoid the mistakes police departments across the country have made with the introduction of other equipment such as walkie-talkies, Tasers and dashboard cameras: Some police departments have encountered problems simply because they didn’t test out more than one kind of camera.

He said the decision of whether or not officers would share cameras — they wouldn’t in New Haven — is a part of the discussions that he said needs to happen before cameras are introduced. Getting buy-in from the officers who would be wearing the cameras also is a part of that discussion.

“It’s the whole story of do it right once, or you do it twice,” he said.

Cavaliere said $75 million sounds like a lot, but when you consider all the costs that are associated with the cameras, he conservatively estimates it could easily cost New Haven $1 million a year. He suggested the money might better be invested in equipment upgrades and training. He said five or six years ago the department purchased about 100 Tasers and many of them are now malfunctioning and don’t hold a charge. New ones supposedly have arrived, but have yet to be distributed he said.

“We’d rather have Tasers, than a camera,” he said.

The ACLU of Connecticut supports the introduction of police body cameras. But it is cautioning police departments to implement strict policies about when and what they record, and how much of that footage they store. ACLU-CT spokeswoman Jeanne Leblanc said individual officers should not get to arbitrarily decide when their cameras should be off, but in routine matters that take them into peoples’ homes, they should have to ask for permission to record.

“Obviously the real value is in a confrontation, arrest and public interaction,” Leblanc said. ​“In those cases the camera should be worn and they should be on. In those circumstances it should not be up to the police officer because then it will protect only the police officer, when it should be protecting both the officer and the person interacting with the officer.”

Leblanc said there should be very few situations where an officer’s camera is off, which means lots of footage that won’t be relevant to anything. ACLU-CT wants police departments to limit how much irrelevant footage is stored to ensure that body cameras don’t become an impetus for implementing a general surveillance program.

Though there are a lot of thorny issues to work out, Esserman said he thinks that working through those issues with the union at the table ensures that officers are treated with the same dignity and respect that they are expected to practice on a daily basis.
​“I think that most every officer will find it to be in their best interest and their best safety. We just believe dignity and respect go a long way and we’re not just preaching it but practicing it, not just on the street but in the police department.”

Fair: A Waste

Longtime New Haven activist Barbara Fair (pictured) called Obama’s proposal a waste of taxpayer money. She called the death of Eric Garner at the hands of New York police officers, and the failure of a grand jury to indict those officers, a prime example of why.

“You have video where you can see the entire action,” she said. ​“This man was choked to death. Eleven times he said, ​‘I can’t breathe’. And they still can’t get an indictment? What more do you need?”

Fair said when cops aren’t indicted for excessive use of force, or for killing someone, it emboldens them in a way that won’t be thwarted just because video evidence shows that they did it. She said increasingly people film police officers, and it’s not uncommon for an officer to trash talk the person filming them.

“These officers are so arrogant and pumped up with power,” she said. ​“We have to acknowledge that this system is built on black inferiority and white supremacy, and it can’t be reformed.The only way to change things is to completely shut the whole system down” through sustained action. ​“The system is so sick that it can’t be healed,” she said. ​“It breaks my heart every time I see this dad [Garner], this husband, this son chocked to death. They don’t respect our humanity. They never have.”