UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER: I'm just checking on you. He reaches into his coat and he pulls out his iPhone. The man was holding his own phone videotaping the officer and the officer did the same. There's this amazing video on YouTube - a recent encounter between this black man who was stopped by a white officer in Michigan. Even when departments don't buy the system, some officers either buy their own version of this or they'll just use their phone to record interactions. KASTE: Well, police tend to like the cameras, especially when they're controlling the camera.
They would find that there was no video made or there was a technical problem and that tended to happen in situations where the officers were under suspicion of doing something wrong.ĬORNISH: Generally, what have you heard from police officers about this technology? But when I spent some time there with the independent monitor who keeps tabs on complaints - public's complaints - against the officers, that monitor kept running into the problem of missing video.
So there's a sense here that it keeps everybody honest - the police officer, but the public too, so you don't get unfounded complaints.īut in other places, like New Orleans, which is a troubled department and the federal government has been looking over their shoulders, they bought cameras for all of their patrol officers earlier this spring. In 2012, when they first started using these cameras, they say the complaints against their officers fell by 88 percent. The proponents of these cameras point to Rialto, California - one of the early adopters. Have they been shown to improve their relationship with the public? At the end of his or her shift, the officer hooks it into some kind of a portal and that video is saved into a database or a cloud service.ĬORNISH: And some police departments have used these cameras for the last couple of years. Then the officer touches a button and they start to save the video and they're supposed to keep saving video until the officer touches the button again at the end of the interaction. They're constantly recording and then they just keep overwriting that data until an interaction with the public starts. They're worn on the body, either on the chest or on your glasses, and they're always rolling, like a black box in an airplane. MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: Well, they're pointed at the public. And, Martin, first explain how the cameras work and, more importantly, how they're different from dash cams, which are common in police cars. NPR's Martin Kaste has been reporting on the expansion of body cams for the last couple of years and he joins us now. And some law enforcement officials believe the devices also protect police.
Now, many of the Ferguson protesters have called for universal adoption of the devices as a means to increase police accountability. Yesterday, President Obama proposed spending $263 million on training and new equipment for local police, including $75 million in grants for the purchase of new body cameras.
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