Editorial | Where are the body cams?

Unlike his silence when the matter had been raised in the past, the police commissioner, Antony Anderson, should explain why the constabulary has been unable to produce video evidence from body-worn cameras in any fatal shooting by police officers up to the end of October this year.

There might well be very rational and compelling reasons for this, but Major General Anderson will no doubt admit that in the absence of such an explanation, the whole thing will, to reasonable people, seem suspicious. And a claim that the problem is the low ratio of available cameras to police officers will not suffice.

This issue returned to the fore last week when Hamish Campbell, the deputy head of the Independent Commission for Investigations (INDECOM), the body that investigates killings or complaints of abuse by the security forces, lamented that it has been offered no footage from a single incident that resulted in 119 police homicides in the first 10 months of 2023.

“None of these incidents had body-worn cameras,” Mr Campbell said.

What makes this failure worse in INDECOM’s assessment was that “a significant number of these shooting incidents arise from planned police operations to visit premises to arrest and search, and none of the officers were either trained or equipped or in possession of body-worn cameras”.

These concerns are especially troubling, given that neither the question of body-worn cameras for the constabulary nor the specific observations by INDECOM are new.

INCREASE ACCOUNTABILITY

Nearly a dozen years ago, in 2012, the then national security minister, Peter Bunting, promised that the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) would be kitted out with body-worn cameras as a measure to increase accountability. This could work in two ways. Video footage could provide indictable evidence against cops, or it could be exculpating.

In 2016, nearly four years after Mr Bunting’s promise of the body cams, the United States government financed the first 120 for trial. There was no public reporting on the outcome of this pilot, but it has been suggested that the constabulary had concerns about the specific equipment and the lack of funding to build out the supporting infrastructure for the system, including data-storage facilities. Which, however, did not mean that the existing system was an entire dud which recorded no information, although none was ever shared with the public or INDECOM.

In 2018, Major General Anderson, newly installed as the police chief, was adamant about his commitment to the deployment of body cams. While he has aggressively pursued the infusion of technologies into the JCF, the introduction and use of body cameras appears not to have been at the top of the priority list. However, in April, the national security minister, Horace Chang, told Parliament that 400 of these cameras had been acquired and deployed across the police force. That would mean there were fewer than four cameras available for every 100 cops.

Dr Chang had, however, said that the overall number of cameras would move to 1,000 by the end of this fiscal year. Among the reasons he gave for the seeming less-than-full use of the cameras was the design of the existing police uniform, which did not readily facilitate the equipment.

That, on the face of it, is hardly a compelling argument. Motivated people will readily innovate. Moreover, the JCF has rolled out a new uniform, in new colours, which is worn alongside the old one.

But the more pressing issue with respect to the use of body-worn cameras is emphasis and priority. Obviously, every cop can’t be issued with one if there are 400, or even 1,000 for the entire police force.

METICULOUSLY-PREPARED

Planned police operations are exactly that – they are presumably meticulously prepared deployments where all potential variables are taken into account. There used to be a time when these operations produced the highest level of police homicides. Our sense is that this is no longer the case. Nonetheless, civilian deaths in these operations, like in many other instances of police homicides, often ignite claims of excessive use of force.

In the circumstances, it would make sense that there is the strategic deployment of the available body cams, as INDECOM has consistently coaxed the police to do.

In June, when the police homicides were 53, Mr Campbell noted, it came to the INDECOM’s attention that in one incident a police officer was wearing a camera, which apparently wasn’t turned on. “Once body-worn cameras are issued, the officer must put them on. If they are defective, it must be reported,” Campbell said.

In January of 2022, Hugh Faulkner, INDECOM’s head, similarly complained about the absence of video footage from incidents involving the police, and urged that cameras be worn by a special police/army unit established to combat gangs.

He said, “We trust that body-worn cameras form a prominent feature of the activities, given that the initiatives seem to be about gangs, guns and gunmen. This, we believe, will assist in any investigative steps taken in the event of an incident.”

That argument was eminently sensible. It may be that all the cameras – 400, 600, 1,000 … whatever the number – are widely dispersed among the more than 12,000 police officers. And it may be that the laws of probability have worked against any of these cameras capturing footage in any incident that would be useful to INDECOM. In that event, there might have to be a rethink of how they are deployed along the lines recommended by INDECOM.