Most St. Louis-area police officers still aren’t wearing body cameras one year after violent protests erupted in the suburb of Ferguson over Michael Brown’s shooting by a white police officer.
The disputed version of events surrounding Brown’s death spurred local riots and forced a national dialogue on race relations and police brutality, and was the driving force behind a new nationwide push for body cameras for police. Now, protesters are pointing to another disputed incident involving a police shooting that could have been easily resolved if captured on a body camera.
County officials declared a state of emergency in the St. Louis suburbs Monday after police critically wounded an 18-year-old black teen they said fired on them first during a day of protests marking the anniversary of Brown’s death. Ferguson will remain under a state of emergency for at least another night, county officials said Wednesday, giving county police oversight of security in the city of 21,000 people.
Think tanks and organizations across the political spectrum studying the clashes between police are questioning why most Ferguson police officers still aren’t wearing body cameras a year after last year’s rioting there made the city synonymous with the strained relations between police and the black community.
“Without question, having body cameras in an area like Ferguson would be a good thing,” said Michelle Jawando, vice president, legal progress at the Center for American Progress. “There’s this tension between where does the privacy begin and end. These are difficult questions that we’re going to have to continue to wrestle with.”
Jawando argued that body cameras are just one area of community policing reforms the center supports, along with training about the use of force and implicit bias.
Others point to body cameras as the solution grabbing most of the bipartisan support over the last year. Tim Lynch, a legal expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, predicts that body cameras will become standard-issue equipment for most police departments across the country in a matter of a few years.
“I don’t see why [body cameras] haven’t been put in place” in Ferguson, he said. “You would think that places like Ferguson and greater St. Louis, as well as Baltimore, would move quickly to get this to be standard equipment for their rank and file.”
“The momentum is behind cameras,” he added.
In the wake of Brown’s death last year and the subsequent unrest, two private companies, Safety Visions and Digital Ally, donated about 50 body cameras to the Ferguson police department, and some officers began wearing them almost immediately.
But St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar this week said the department doesn’t have funding for body cameras for all of its nearly 900 officers. Along with cost, privacy and controls on public access to the footage have made some localities resistant.
Lynch suggested that if a police officer videotapes someone in a public place, there should be different rules governing that video’s public release than when people are taped in private locations, such as their homes.
Dozens of cities and counties across the country and have moved quickly to embrace the idea of body cameras in the months since the Ferguson unrest, as well as uproars over the death of a black man in New York who died in a chokehold and a string of other incidents across the country involving police shootings of black men.
The Charleston, S.C., police department implemented a body camera policy earlier this year outfitting most of its officers with body-mounted video cameras they are required to wear during most civilian interactions. The city ordered 130 cameras using more than $100,000 it already had secured using federal grants and a Charleston police fund.
Police body cameras became an even hotter topic in South Carolina since the April 4 shooting of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, by a North Charleston police officer.
Gov. Nikki Haley signed a law in June requiring body cameras statewide. The measure also specifies when they should and should not be recording and how the videos are stored and used. The law requires a statewide group of law enforcement professionals to review the guidelines and approve them.
Just Wednesday, Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner signed a bill that local lawmakers are touting as the most comprehensive body camera bill in the country. The legislation would not require police departments to use body cameras, but provides rules for those that do and expands police training to include topics like the use of force and barring chokeholds.
At least 37 states this year have considered legislation on some aspect of body-warn cameras for law enforcement. Fifteen have enacted new laws this year and 19 states and the District of Columbia have some type of law on police cameras, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The Justice Department in May announced a $20 million body camera pilot partnership program to provide grants to localities seeking the cameras.
Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., has written a bill to provide $100 million more in federal grants to help pay for police body cameras across the country. Scott would pay for the grants by cutting back on federal employee restrictive leave, a likely sticking point for Democrats.
The bill would provide more than 120,000 of the cameras to different localities across the country and would require a 25 percent local match. Scott is aiming to insert the language in a massive criminal justice reform bill Congress is likely to take up this fall.
