By David Gambacorta and Dana Difilippo
Philadelphia Daily News
PHILADELPHIA — WHO KNEW that four little words — You are being recorded — could be so magical?
At least, that’s what cops in North Philadelphia’s 22nd District have found since they volunteered eight months ago to take part in a pilot program that tested the viability of body cameras.
Officer Roger McFadden, who’s been in charge of monitoring the district’s program, said he observed several encounters between civilians and officers that seemed to change dramatically because of the presence of the cameras.
He recalled one in particular Tuesday, while taking temporary refuge in an air-conditioned conference room from the humid corridors of the district’s headquarters at 17th Street and Montgomery Avenue.
“There’s video of a gentleman being arrested,” he said. “He puts himself on the ground near three officers and yells, ‘They’re beating me!’ ”
The man continued to howl — even though the cops weren’t striking him.
“Then one of the officers leans over and says, ‘You are being recorded,’ ” McFadden said, “and he just stops everything and says, ‘Oh, OK.’ ”
In the wake of a spate of controversial police-involved shootings across the country, calls have grown for widespread expansion of police body-camera programs.
President Obama in December proposed putting up $75 million in matching federal funds to outfit 50,000 police officers nationwide with the technology. (His Task Force on 21st Century Policing - co-chaired by Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey - delved into the pros and cons of body cameras.)
In March, the success of the pilot program in the 22nd District spurred Mayor Nutter to call for the city to outfit as many as 450 cops with body cameras this year at a cost of about $500,000.
On the surface, it’s easy to see why politicians, police officials and reformers would embrace body cameras. The devices don’t have agendas. Activists who distrust police narratives and cops who are tired of being accused of lying about the way an encounter unfolded could simply rely on the footage to tell the story.
“The body cameras make good cops great cops and make marginal ones follow the rules,” said SEPTA Police Chief Thomas Nestel, whose 275-officer force has been piloting a body-camera program since July 2014.
Still, although the technology itself is an easy sell, it carries a host of complications. Police departments must navigate concerns about civil-rights infringements, government transparency and storing a massive influx of data as body cameras evolve from temporary curiosity to a standard law-enforcement tool.
“It is a good tool,” Capt. Francis Healy, Ramsey’s legal adviser, told the Daily News last week, “but it’s not the end-all, be-all.”
And city Controller Alan Butkovitz complained that in the past the city has been quick to embrace technology without ironing out all the kinks, such as with the problem-plagued street-corner police surveillance cameras.
“If the city is going to do it, they’ve got to do it right,” Butkovitz said. “Philadelphia has a long history of disappointment in bringing in new technology. And getting sketchy information is as bad as getting not enough information at all.”
McFadden said 22nd District cops tried out cameras from seven or eight manufacturers, but quickly found that one produced by Taser met their needs the best.
“It’s easy to operate,” Officer Anthony Case, a five-year veteran of the force, said while holding the small, square camera, which feels lighter than a smartphone.
“I was looking forward to using it. I thought it was a progressive idea on the department’s behalf,” he said. “If I go on the street without it, I feel like I’m going back in time a little bit.”
45 Minutes Of Footage
Initially some worried that the cops in the trial program would record an astronomical amount of footage. But on most days, officers are turning in only about 45 minutes’ worth of footage.
“There’s no department that I know of personally that actually runs their cameras constantly,” Healy said. “We only require officers to turn them on when they’re going to be dispatched to a job, or when they’re making a car stop or pedestrian stop.”
Nestel agreed: “It would be lovely to have the cameras running all the time, but I’d get way too much information. I don’t want to see how big the stromboli is that my officer is eating for lunch or hear about their Saturday night social activities. What’s important is the interaction between the public and the police.”
To that end, Nestel has directed his officers to activate their cameras when they go on a radio call or interact with the public.
That concerns some civil-rights activists.
“We are always concerned when the government, particularly the police, collects large amounts of information about people who aren’t entering the criminal-justice system,” said Mary Catherine Roper, deputy legal director at the ACLU of Pennsylvania.
“The body cameras will catch everyone who even stops to ask an officer for directions,” Roper added. “We’re concerned that it not become a bank of ‘suspicious characters’ for police to look through later. They need to be adopted with a lot of caution and care and protections.”
Police likewise are grappling with privacy issues, including restrictions posed by the state’s wiretap law. For example, what happens when a body-camera-wearing cop enters a property and a resident tells him not to record?
“The way the law is written, we have to shut the camera off if someone says don’t record,” he said. “But what if I’m responding to a theft report and I see drug activity in there?”
Then there’s the footage itself. Will citizens — and reporters — be owed copies of body-camera footage tied to a controversial case?
Healy said any footage flagged as possible evidence will be treated as investigative material, which the department isn’t required to fork over under the Right to Know law. “Historically, when a homicide case is over, we still don’t allow the public to have copies of our files,” he said. “So our theory is that we won’t have to release [videos] unless we’re compelled to. Whether or not that will hold up under scrutiny remains to be seen.”
The biggest concern Healy and others in the police department have about the technology involves something you don’t see: data storage. It’s a perfectly manageable task for now, while the cameras are worn by a handful of cops in one district. But what happens when thousands of cops across the city are wearing cameras, recording countless conversations and encounters every day?
This is where Mike Vidro comes in. Vidro, the city’s director of public safety technology, probably felt his blood pressure skyrocket during the pilot program’s early days, when he saw cops in the 22nd District upload six hours’ worth of footage daily.
But as time wore on, the officers got a better handle on which encounters were worth recording, and the length of daily videos plummeted to about 45 minutes. Still, figuring out how to store the videos - and keep them easily accessible - took some doing.
Bluetooth Technology
The short version goes like this: Relying on Bluetooth technology, Vidro figured out a way for officers to review their recorded encounters on the Mobile Data Terminals in their cruisers, flagging sections that pertain to a specific incident. When the cops return to their district headquarters at the end of their shift, they plug the cameras into a terminal and the footage is uploaded to the district’s server. The camera then is wiped clean, leaving it empty for the next shift.
All of the district’s recordings are sorted based on their designations - homicides, robberies, hit-and-run accidents - and can be accessed by other law-enforcement officials through the city’s evidence-management system.
Footage from homicide cases will be stored for 99 years; most others for just 15 days, Healy said.
“Fifteen days seems reasonable,” he said. “Our Internal Affairs people are somewhat happy with that. If a complaint comes in, that’s enough time for them to look at the video if they need it.”
SEPTA’s Nestel agreed that storage was the biggest challenge his department found in its body-camera trial.
“I now have 300 cameras that are ready to roll out as soon as I get the memory for my server,” Nestel said. “Where to put all this video is the biggest question.”
Supervisors will randomly pick a few officers every day and review their body-camera footage for anything of concern, Nestel added.
SEPTA will keep body-camera video 30 to 90 days, unless it’s needed as evidence in a criminal case or could be used for training, he added. Otherwise, Nestel plans to rely on most of the same policies that apply to the 18,000 security cameras on 2,100 SEPTA vehicles and 1,600 cameras at 70 SEPTA stations.
The cameras already have proven useful, Nestel added. A passenger hustling off a train recently caught the eye of an officer who had no reason to stop him — until another passenger emerged from the train yelling that he’d just been robbed, Nestel said. Police later made an arrest — with a big assist from the body camera, which caught a clear image of the alleged thief as he hurried past the officer, Nestel added.
Complaints Withdrawn
McFadden said several civilians withdrew complaints against 22nd District cops once they learned that the encounter they’d had was recorded.
Officer Michael Goode recalled struggling with a man who was high on drugs and refusing to leave someone’s house in North Philly.
The man took a swing at the nine-year veteran, then tried to step on his camera when the device clattered to the ground during a struggle over an arrest.
“I was a little apprehensive at first about being criticized while doing my job, but after a few weeks I got used to it,” Goode said. “I’m not going to second-guess myself.”
McFadden said he regards the cameras as a positive tool for the Police Department.
“I think the way the public sees it, if we have body cameras, it’ll show what we do, good or bad,” he said. “From our perspective, it also covers us in case someone makes something up. It clears the air.”
The pros and cons of police body cameras
Pros
* Behavior: Police and the public tend to act better when they know the camera is rolling, advocates say. “The body cameras make good cops great cops and make marginal ones follow the rules,” SEPTA Police Chief Thomas Nestel said. “It also shows the public how [poorly] some folks treat the police. The cameras protect both sides.”
* Brutality: Use-of-force incidents and complaints against police fell in one Southern California city that implemented a police body camera program, according to a study by the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology that was published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology last year. Researchers found that complaints against police fell nearly 90 percent and use-of-force about 50 percent in Rialto, Calif., a year after city police began using body cameras.
* Evidence: Countless domestic violence cases get dismissed because victims often recant or are reluctant to cooperate with police. Footage from officers called to intervene make it difficult to dispute the violence, supporters say.
* Aggressive dogs: With nearly 80 million owned dogs nationally, cops encounter - and shoot - dogs daily. Philadelphia police, for example, shot an average of 30 to 40 dogs each year in the past decade, police data show. Body camera footage would show investigators and pet owners why officers felt threatened enough to fire, supporters say.
Cons
* Data storage: Storing thousands of hours of video footage could get cumbersome and expensive.
* Privacy: Pennsylvania law forbids anyone from filming a person in their home, except with permission. Civil-rights advocates also worry how police might use footage of civilians they encounter in innocuous encounters, such as someone asking a cop for directions.
* Public access: As reformers argue for transparency, body cameras could pose a challenge for police who would argue footage should be withheld as evidence.
Copyright 2015 the Philadelphia Daily News