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The Wilkes-Barre Police Department is the largest in Luzerne County for a simple reason: It’s the largest city in the county by population. So when the city administration and the police department agreed to equip officers with body cameras, by numbers alone it’s a much bigger deal than the same decision in any of our 76 incorporated municipalities.
We applaud Mayor George Brown and the Wilkes-Barre Police Benevolent Association, the union representing the city’s men in blue, for making the move.
We also applaud an appropriately cautious approach to deploying the cameras. As staff writer Jerry Lynott reported in Wednesday’s paper, Chief Joseph Coffay predicted it could be one to three months before all the pieces are in place.
For those rightly concerned about recurring cases of questionable police behavior across the country — including actions that led to deaths of unarmed people in police custody or during police pursuit — the urge to act more quickly is understandable. It is also wrong-headed.
Lynott asked University of Scranton Professor Michael Jenkins about the issue. As Department Chair and Associate Professor of Sociology, Criminal Justice and Criminology, Jenkins offered a list of considerations:
Policy must be developed to determine when the cameras are on or off: The entire shift? Only when officers interact with citizens? Does the officer have discretion over the activation of a camera?
How long will recordings be kept in storage? Will there be a priority that says some can be erased while others (related to investigations by police or complaints against them, for example) are kept?
Using the recorded video to prosecute criminal defendants, and to conduct investigations of complaints against police, may be obvious, but what about internal use to discipline police, or to simply to help supervisors detect mistakes — real or perceived — of rank and file officers?
Those are just some of the concerns voiced by Jenkins, and we strongly suspect they are the tip of the iceberg. Should recordings be considered public record accessible through the state Right To Know law? Should police officers have access to their own recordings, and if so how much? Should the police union have access to address/settle union grievances? If recordings are used in criminal prosecutions, internal investigations or any other official capacity with real world impact, can they be edited, who gets to do the cutting and pasting, and what safeguards should be in place to assure edited clips are representative of the big picture?
The list surely goes on with more consideration by all those impacted.
So, yes, taking time to get it all right is important. Taking too much time, of course, will leave the issues that body cameras can resolve unmonitored, but a month or three does not seem too long considering the complexity of issues and ramifications of getting it wrong.
Check policies in similarly-sized departments, check case law as the body cam trend keeps growing, and check with more outside experts like Jenkins. Perhaps most importantly, treat any policy decisions as a “living document” that will adapt as unexpected issues develop.
There is little doubt police body cams can and will improve transparency and professionalism on police forces while protecting citizen rights. But this is new turf rife with risks, and caution is both warranted and essential to success.
— Times Leader