Editorial | What became of the police body cams?

There are as yet no data on the numbers of them mounted in motor vehicles in Jamaica. But as this newspaper reported on Sunday, an increasing number of people are installing dashboard cameras in their cars.

Mostly, they are intended by their owners to provide evidence and to settle disputes in the event of motor vehicle crashes as Peter Levy, the CEO of the insurance company BCCI, noted in his recounting of how images from a friend's dash cam resolved conflicting claims of who had caused an accident. "It's definitely something (the installation of dash cams) I would encourage," Mr Levy said.

If these cameras, as Mr Levy says, make sense, the insurance industry might want to encourage their increased use by pricing their coverage to reflect the lower cost to their business of having cameras installed, such as less time and manpower in investigating accidents when claims are made and the video evidence is available. Of course, there would also have to be protocols, underpinned by legislation, on how such videos are shot, stored and retrieved. Issues relating to the safe use of vehicles while dash cams are running would also have to be settled.

RECORDED ACTIONS

This, however, is not like the complete reinvention of the wheel. For although dash cams, employed in this fashion, are not standard features in cars, they are widely used in law-enforcement vehicles as a way of ensuring police accountability. Law-enforcement officers are more likely to employ restraint and operate according to the rules if they know that their actions are being recorded.

Indeed, this was the reasoning behind a plan to introduce body-worn cameras among the police. But like so many other initiatives, it appears to have fallen into a deep crevice. If that is the case, hopefully, it can be retrieved.

The body cam issue was hot on the agenda during the life of the former administration, while Peter Bunting was the national security minister, and Jamaicans, as they still do, often alleged abuse by the police. The cost of equipping the 12,000-member constabulary with body cameras, however, was a constraint, until the United States government agreed to give the project a jump-start.

In August 2016, six months into his tenure as minister as well as the life of the new government, Robert Montague, Mr Bunting's successor, announced the start of a pilot project on the use of body cameras by police officers. One hundred and twenty devices and related software had been acquired and paid for by the United States government at a cost of US$40,000.

TOO FEW CAMERAS

This newspaper's concern at the time was that so few cameras had been acquired and that the protocol for the use meant, apparently because of limited battery life, that they would be turned on only when a police officer went on an operation, rather than being on for the entire period of his or her shift. We understood, though, the matter of cost and that the donors provided what, in the circumstances, could be afforded. We might have complained also that too few cameras would have been deployed.

Those complaints, from this distance, seem prosaic. At issue now is whether the cameras were ever received, and if so, were they ever deployed, and where are they now? The point is, there have been few reported sightings of body cameras in use on operations, and we don't recall the police producing video evidence from them in vindication of their actions. Nor have we been privy to the documented outcomes of the pilot project, if, indeed, a report was done. Maybe the new police chief, Major General Antony Anderson, in the interest of transparency, might enlighten our ignorance and forgive us for it.