Tag Archives: Body Cameras

New York City police to wear body cameras under labor settlement

NYPD now needing cameras

By Hilary Russ

NEW YORK (Reuters) – New York City and its largest police union settled on a tentative five-year labor contract on Tuesday that includes salary increases while also agreeing that all patrol officers will wear body cameras by the end of 2019.

The agreement “is a big step forward for a vision of safety in which police and the community are true partners,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a press conference with union and police officials.

The New York Police Department, the nation’s largest, already has a pilot program with cameras for 1,000 officers. But further rollout was stymied by a lawsuit, which the union agreed to drop as part of the deal.

New York will join other cities requiring their police forces to wear body cameras amid nationwide concerns over use of excessive force by police. Chicago aims to have the devices on all officers by the end of this year.

The contract agreement also removes a potentially expensive uncertainty that was a hold-over from former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who left office at the end of 2013 with every public-sector labor contract long-expired.

Since taking office, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has chipped away at negotiations with teachers and other unions, but the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association contract was still a major sticking point.

Reached at about 4 a.m. on Tuesday, the agreement will cost the city $530.4 million altogether, most of which will be covered by a labor reserve fund. Including healthcare savings, the net cost to the city is $336.7 million.

The deal, covering nearly 24,000 police officers, includes a 2.25 percent bump in base salary for patrol officers as they shift to a new method of neighborhood policing which focuses more on beat patrols and community interaction.

The increase that patrol officers get will be offset in part by lower starting salaries for new hires, although their maximum salaries will rise. Upon approval by union members, the new contract would go into effect March 15.

The city will also support the union’s efforts to get state lawmakers to provide disability benefits at three-quarters of salary, while the union agreed to drop other lawsuits against the city.

(Reporting by Hilary Russ; Editing by Daniel Bases and Andrew Hay)

U.S. police body camera policies put civil rights at risk: study

By Gina Cherelus

(Reuters) – Police forces in 50 U.S. cities are failing to protect the civil rights and privacy of residents due to the inadequacy of programs that govern how their officers use body-worn cameras, a report by a coalition of rights groups said on Tuesday.

Many U.S. cities have approved or expanded the use of body cameras since August 2014, when a white police officer fatally shot an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri. That incident triggered protests and a national debate about police use of force, especially against minorities.

The study was conducted for The Leadership Conference of Civil and Human Rights coalition by Upturn, a Washington DC-based company that studies how technology affects social issues.

“Body cameras carry the promise of officer accountability, but accountability is far from automatic,” Harlan Yu, principal of Upturn, said on a conference call with reporters.

The study focused on the nation’s largest police departments that have body-worn camera programs, as well as programs that have received federal funding, and those in cities that have had high-profile incidents involving law enforcement officers.

It judged them against eight criteria, including whether each department publishes its body camera policy, to what degree officers are allowed discretion about when they turn on and off their cameras, and whether officers involved in incidents are prohibited from watching the footage before they write reports.

The study found that none of the departments it analyzed met all the criteria, and that the police departments in Ferguson and in Fresno, California, failed all of them. Nearly half did not make body camera footage easily accessible to the public. (Link to the report: https://www.bwcscorecard.org/)

Three major departments with programs – Detroit, Michigan, Aurora, Colorado, and Pittsburg, Pennsylvania – have not made their body camera policies public, the study said.

Representatives of the police departments in Aurora, Detroit, Pittsburg and Ferguson did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The coalition released an initial report in November 2015 that studied body camera programs from 25 departments.

The group said some issues have improved since that report, noting several departments, including Chicago, Washington D.C. and Cincinnati now provide individuals who are recorded the opportunity to view the footage.

“Without carefully crafted policy safeguards, these devices could become instruments of injustice rather than tools of accountability,” Wade Henderson, the coalition’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.

(Reporting by Gina Cherelus; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Dan Grebler)