- November 17, 2024
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The Sheriff’s Office likes its body cameras: They reduce complaints and the likelihood of a deputy using force. The Public Defender’s Office, however, worries that the thousands of hours of video the cameras produce will overload its attorneys.
“The logistics of it, right now, basically make your brain explode,” Public Defender James Purdy said. “When you think about all the things behind the scenes that nobody thought about when they said, ‘Hey, body cameras sound great!’ And they do. … But buying the body cameras is simple. It’s everything that happens after that are the unforeseen consequences.”
For instance, he said, all of the footage related to a case becomes part of the evidence chain, and “the logistics of trying to get a handle on it is going to be very, very overwhelming.” A simple warrant search of a house might involve seven officers, all with cameras recording. Several such cases might mean 15-20 hours of video the Public Defender’s Office would have to review.
“When you start adding those up, there simply are not enough hours in the week for an attorney to be able to do that. So we’re anticipating a significant increase in the workload,” he said. “I was advised by the State Attorney’s Office that the Daytona Beach Police Department, from January to October of last year, had 70,000 hours of video. And you can’t watch 70,000 hours of video if you’re a defense attorney with less than 70,000 hours.”
Purdy said the cameras do have benefits. “More evidence is always better. First-hand information is always better,” he said. “I’d much rather see a video of a police officer interview a suspect than read a report of what happened in that interview if it was not taped.” But with body cameras, he said, “There’s going to be a lot of taping of superfluous stuff” that attorneys have to watch to ensure they don’t miss anything.
The volume of footage the cameras produce can add staff time for law enforcement agencies, too. Purdy told the county’s Public Safety Advisory Council that some places have given up their camera programs because officers have spent hours redacting footage — muting audio or blurring out faces — before the video is sent out for public records requests.
But studies of the cameras’ use in police departments and sheriff’s offices around the country consistently show clear benefits, Sheriff James Manfre said.
“This is something that should go nationwide,” he said. “Because whatever the small costs are, they’re heavily outweighed by the benefits of videotaping.”
Anyone who’s pulled out a camera in a room full of people and watched the reactions, he said, knows a camera changes behavior. “(People) stand a little taller, and they smile and put their best face forward,” he said “That’s exactly what happens when people know they’re on video.”
The Sheriff’s Office hasn’t run detailed studies on the cameras’ impact, but ones done elsewhere show clear benefits. A 2012 study in Rialto, California, showed that over a year, there was a 60% drop in officer use-of-force incidents after the cameras were deployed, and an 88% drop in citizen complaints between the year before the department implemented the program to the year after, according to a Justice Department publication. A similar study in Mesa, Arizona, of two groups of officers — 50 with the cameras, and another 50 without — showed that the group of officers without cameras had almost three times as many complaints as the group with the cameras.
“It’s transforming law enforcement, simply because it changes the interaction between the public we serve and law enforcement officers,” Manfre said. “The public isn’t always happy to see us. … It tamps down the behavior of the people we’re dealing with, once they know they’re on camera. It’s why in every district where they’ve been implemented, use of force has gone down dramatically, and complaints have gone down dramatically. … Exactly what the public wants to see, is exactly what’s happening.”
The Flagler County Sheriff’s Office began using body cameras more than a year ago, when it bought 20 cameras from the Taser corporation and gave them to road deputies. Now all road deputies have them, as do many deputies who work in the county jail.
Since the Sheriff’s Office began the program, the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, has led to a renewed push for law enforcement agencies to use body cameras. The Obama administration in December unveiled a three-year plan on community policing which includes about $75 million to help give officers up to 50,000 cameras.
While some police unions have objected to the cameras, saying they represent a change in working conditions for law enforcement officers, the Coastal Florida Police Benevolent Association, which represents Flagler’s deputies, is in favor of the cameras — if agencies have clear policies on how the information is released, in accordance with Florida’s open records laws.
“It’s something we support, provided it is used properly,” said Coastal Florida PBA spokesman Mike Scudiero. “And that does get a little tricky at times, because this is such new technology that policies and procedures surrounding it have not clearly been identified as standard use yet. Each department is kind of doing their own thing.”
Departments are still determining, for instance, what should be redacted to protect officers’ or citizens’ privacy. Sometimes it’s clear: If an officer uses a body camera in a hospital, for instance, privacy laws prevent agencies from releasing videos that would reveal certain medical data. Still, he said, “there’s a lot of disagreement” about what should be redacted.
But even as departments work through those issues, Scudiero said, the technology “helps clear officers more than it jeopardizes them,” and its use will likely expand.
“This is probably technology that’s here to stay. Now it’s just a matter of how it’s going to be used,” he said. “I’m sure it won’t be long before just about everybody out there has them.”
Manfre said the Sheriff’s Office has already seen the program’s benefit.
“We’ve had zero use-of-force complaints since it’s been implemented,” Manfre said. “And also, of the complaints we’ve gotten since, one of two things happen: Once they know they’re on video, the complaint has been dropped, or we review the video, and it clears the officer.”
Cameras would also encourage an officer inclined to misbehave not to, he said.
The value to agencies comes with a financial cost — each camera is about $500, and a yearly charge for Taser to store the Sheriff’s Office’s video footage securely is about $50,000 — but, so far, Manfre said, the Sheriff’s Office hasn’t had to add work hours to deal with large-scale requests for footage.
And even if the program does add some cost, he said, it’s worth it.
“It’s part of doing business. It’s part of this technology,” he said. “It was the same thing when we implemented radio … and when we instituted mobile data terminals inside of the police vehicles. Was there an expense to that? Was there additional time and training? Yes. Did it revolutionize how we do law enforcement? Yes. Yes, there is an expense to it, but when it comes to protecting the public, I do think these kinds of expenditures are well worth it.”
The financial investment in cameras could also yield other returns.
“This is a dream for law enforcement, to have this kind of technology,” Manfre said. “The amount of time that it will save by not having deputies go to depositions, or go to trial, will more than make up for any of the up-front expense.”
In the meantime, said Purdy, the Public Defender’s Office will have to figure out how to handle the increased workload the cameras produce.
It will probably have to buy new servers to handle the footage.
And it might need more staff, a problem that would have to be addressed by the Legislature, which “might take up to the next legislative session” to deal with it. And even though adding attorneys might relieve the workload problem, that move would have its own consequences down the line.
“We may have to double our staff, which means we might have to double our office space, which might mean we need a new courthouse,” Purdy said. “The ball just keeps rolling downhill. There’s no telling where the end result of this is, because it’s really early in the game.”
