Editorial | Getting body cams done

Kevin Blake, Jamaica’s police commissioner, obviously understands matters of technology.

His first degree is in computer science and mathematics. He has an MSc in computer-based management information systems. He earned a PhD in sustainable development.

Moreover, Dr Blake was project lead on several of the Jamaica Constabulary Force’s (JCF) technology projects, especially at the National Intelligence Bureau, which he headed for a decade.

So, the police chief must know what he is talking about when he explains that implementing the wearing of body cameras by a 12,000-member constabulary first requires the buildout of infrastructure to support the system. Data/images collected by the cameras have, for instance, to be transmitted to, and stored on, a database and have to be easily retrievable.

“We have been working over the past two to three years building up that infrastructure, strengthening our ... data centre [and] ensuring that our network communications are adequate, so that we can properly manage the products from these body-worn cameras,” Dr Blake said last week, during a tour of western Jamaica.

“Now that we have completed that, the next part of the project is to actually procure body-worn cameras and pin them on to our members,” he added. “This is the easy part.”

SPECIFICITY

What Dr Blake did not do, though, is to give a timeline for completing “the easy part” of the project.

While no one questions the commissioner’s declaration of the constabulary’s support for the wearing of body cams, or the intricacies of preparing for their use, some will remind that the police force has been at it for a long time – at least a dozen years.

That is why, while welcoming the commissioner’s suggestion that the end is in sight, many people will demand specificity.

Indeed, the wearing of body cameras was first publicly declared a matter of policy for the police in 2012 by the then national security minister, Peter Bunting. That was in the early days of the People’s National Party’s 2012-2016 administration.

The idea was that the cameras would help to improve police accountability. While camera footage might incriminate police officers accused of excessive use of force or other forms of misbehaviour, they could also exculpate cops blamed for wrongdoing.

Four years after Mr Bunting’s initial announcement, and with the administration having changed, it was announced that the United States had financed the first 120 cameras for a trial project. However, the outcome of that pilot was never disclosed.

NO FEAR OF ACCOUNTABILITY

When Dr Blake’s predecessor, Major General Antony Anderson, a former army chief, was installed as police commissioner in 2018, he recommitted to the introduction of body cams. It was not clear, however, where the system’s implementation stacked on the constabulary’s list of priorities.

But in April 2023, the current national security minister, Horace Chang, announced that 400 body cams had been acquired and distributed across the constabulary. Another 1,000 were supposed to be bought before the end of the fiscal year, which ended in March 2024. It is not clear that they were in fact acquired.

In the meantime, INDECOM, the independent body that investigates citizens’ complaints against, as well as all shootings by the police, consistently complained that it was never able to acquire video footage from the constabulary for any of their encounters with citizens. These included 119 police killings in the first 10 months of 2023.

“None of these incidents had body-worn cameras,” the agency’s deputy head, Hamish Campbell, said.

What exacerbated this failure, INDECOM argued, was that “a significant number of these shooting incidents arise from planned police operations to visit premises to arrest and search, and none of the officers were either trained or equipped or in possession of body-worn cameras”.

Dr Chang, in his parliamentary presentation last year, had said that the available cameras were not more widely used because police uniforms were not designed for them. They did not easily fit. The police have since been kitted out with newly designed uniforms, which presumably accommodate body cameras.

What is clear from Dr Blake’s comment last week is that the fear of accountability is not, and won’t be, the reason why, going forward, cops do not wear body cams. In fact, the constabulary, at least its leadership, welcomes them.

Said Dr Blake: “This idea that police don’t want to wear body-worn cameras because of whatever intention is nothing further from the truth, because, as I have always reminded my officers – and I have heard from the officers themselves – that if you don’t have a camera on, you may be the only one not recording an incident from your perspective.”

Now that this question has been settled, all that is left for Dr Blake to do is say from when they will be worn, and when INDECOM can get the footage it requires. And stick to the plan.