Editorial | Body-worn cameras won’t fall off

There have been, especially in the early days, many reasons – including technical ones – offered by police forces for their reticence to embrace body-worn cameras (BWC).

Cost was usually high on the list, and sometimes, concerns about the compatibility of the BWCs with a force’s digital technology system. It is not often, if ever, that constabularies say that they decided against BWCs because they will fall off the clothing of officers during operations. The Gleaner could unearth none in its search.

In any event, it was to prevent that problem that the former police commissioner, Antony Anderson, gave as one of the reasons for redesigning the uniform of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF).

We are, therefore, surprised at the suggestion by the national security minister, Horace Chang, that the physical instability of body-worn cameras is the reason for their limited use by Jamaica’s police.

“It is of little value,” Dr Chang, a physician, told reporters last week. “You don’t need to be an expert to understand … . You put a camera on your chest, you start shooting at somebody, they start shooting at you, you going to dive for cover.”

Dr Chang also gave the example of the Jamaica Defence Force, which deployed cameras that were attached to the helmet of soldiers. “They fell off; they got knocked off,” the minister said. “They have very little value in those situations.”

So according to the national security minister, the “primary benefit” of BWCs is their use in public-order situations such as regulating street vending.

IMPLICIT ENDORSEMENT

This was an implicit endorsement of the, thus far, no use, or very limited use, by the police of body-worn cameras during confrontations that often lead to fatalities as well as a rebuke of the Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM), the body that reviews shootings by constables.

The 14,000-member JCF, judging from its public pronouncements, should own around 1,500 BWCs while building out its digital network to accommodate more.

If these cameras will not stay put on the clothing of officers, we agree with The University of the West Indies professor, Anthony Clayton, that the JCF must be buying the wrong type. They should consider changing suppliers.

But what was profoundly disconcerting was Dr Chang’s dismissive attitude about the efficacy of BWC in situations that involve shootings. His stance, on its face, is diametrically counter to the public posture of the police chief, Kevin Blake.

Dr Blake said in August: “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.”

The delay in the full rollout of BWCs, he suggested, was the retrofitting of the JCF technology/information management system so that “our network communications are adequate, … (to) properly manage the products from these body-worn cameras”.

That explanation, though, does not fully satisfy recent concerns raised by INDECOM over the consistent failure of the police to deploy and/or engage BWCs even in planned operations that were likely to result in gunfire and, possibly, fatalities.

In 2024, the police shot and killed 155 people, an increase of 16 per cent on the previous year. Sixty-six were wounded.

None of those incidents was recorded by body-worn cameras.

In one case, an officer wore a camera but failed to turn it on.

FATAL SHOOTINGS

Up to the end of October of this year, the police were engaged in 149 fatal shootings, 58 per cent of which resulted from 50 planned operations. But body-worn cameras were deployed in none of these incidents.

In four cases of non-lethal shootings, the officers were affixed with BWCs, but in three, the cameras were never turned on. In the fourth, it was turned on after the event.

In cases where officers had BWCs that were not used, their argument was that they had no training in their use. Which, if true, is a surprising state of affairs given Dr Blake’s declared commitment to police accountability – and his appreciation of the role that video evidence can play in vindicating cops accused of use of excessive force.

Indeed, the assessment has been mixed from the police forces across the world that have deployed BWCs but weigh in favour of being positive, especially with respect to police accountability.

The Policy Executive Research Forum, an American organisation that researches policing, recently reviewed studies into two decades of the use of BWCs in the US.

The conclusion is that it has been good for officers’ conduct, although in half of the studies on body-worn cameras, there was no difference in use-of-force behaviour.

Officers who routinely did not activate their BWCs were the ones more likely to be involved in use-of-force episodes. And in forces where BWCs were routinely employed, there were significant reductions in complaints of misconduct.

In one 2021 study of several forces across America that used body-worn cameras, complaints against the police dropped 17 per cent, and the use-of-force encounters with citizens, whether these led to fatalities or not, fell by 10 per cent.

There were no complaints, insofar as this newspaper discerned, of BWCs falling off as officers dived for cover.

There are accusations, however, such as an unearthed British Broadcasting Corporation finding in the UK of officers failing to turn on their BWCs.