Hat tip to Blue Jersey for publicizing this ACLU guide to ensuring privacy alongside Police Body-Mounted Cameras, something which has significant support in New Jersey and that we could see in Camden. Here are excerpts from the report:
Although we generally take a dim view of the proliferation of surveillance cameras in American life, police on-body cameras are different because of their potential to serve as a check against the abuse of power by police officers. Historically, there was no documentary evidence of most encounters between police officers and the public, and due to the volatile nature of those encounters, this often resulted in radically divergent accounts of incidents. Cameras have the potential to be a win-win, helping protect the public against police misconduct, and at the same time helping protect police against false accusations of abuse.
We’re against pervasive government surveillance, but when cameras primarily serve the function of allowing public monitoring of the government instead of the other way around, we generally regard that as a good thing. While we have opposed government video surveillance of public places, for example, we have supported the installation of video cameras on police car dashboards, in prisons, and during interrogations.
At the same time, body cameras have more of a potential to invade privacy than those deployments. Police officers enter people’s homes and encounter bystanders, suspects, and victims in a wide variety of sometimes stressful and extreme situations.
For the ACLU, the challenge of on-officer cameras is the tension between their potential to invade privacy and their strong benefit in promoting police accountability.
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If the cameras do not record continuously, that would place them under officer control, which would create the danger that they could be manipulated by some officers, undermining their core purpose of detecting police misconduct. This has sometimes been an issue with patrol car “dashcams” — for example, in the case of two Seattle men who filed a claim for excessive force and wrongful arrest. Parts of the arrest were captured by a dashcam, but parts that should have been captured were mysteriously missing. And with body cams, two Oakland police officers weredisciplined after one of the officers’ cameras was turned off during an incident.
The balance that needs to be struck is to ensure that officers can’t manipulate the video record, while also ensuring that officers are not subjected to a relentless regime of surveillance without any opportunity for shelter from constant monitoring.
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Notice to citizens
Most privacy protections will have to come from restrictions on subsequent retention and use of the recordings. There are, however, a couple of things that can be done at the point of recording.
- Recording should be limited to uniformed officers and marked vehicles, so people know what to expect. An exception should be made for SWAT raids and similar planned uses of force when they involve non-uniformed officers.
- Officers should be required, wherever practicable, to notify people that they are being recorded (similar to existing law for dashcams in some states such as Washington). One possibility departments might consider is for officers to wear an easily visible pin or sticker saying “lapel camera in operation” or words to that effect.
- Although if the preceding policies are properly followed it should not be possible, it is especially important that the cameras not be used to surreptitiously gather intelligence information based on First Amendment protected speech, associations, or religion.
There’s a lot more there. Please, go read the whole thing.
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