Body Cam Report Shows Fewer Agencies Are Allowing Cops To View Footage Before Making Statements

The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) published a report on body cam use by law enforcement agencies in 2014. It not only presented stats on body cam use around the nation, but also attempted to create a set of best practices for the agencies utilizing them.

Since then, body cams have become as commonplace as dash cams. While often touted as a tool to increase transparency and accountability, the truth is a bit more complicated. Many law enforcement agencies refuse to release body cam recordings to public records requesters, negating some of the hoped for transparency. Police unions helped erase some of the accountability, striking deals that allowed officers to view footage before writing reports or making statements to investigators.

What cops may have feared would become an unblinking witness of their bad behavior, capable of costing them their positions, if not their actual jobs, the reality is that body cams became cops’ best friends. Footage cleared officers wrongly accused of misconduct. Better yet, body cam recordings captured plenty of evidence to use against defendants. And when it looked like something bad might be caught on camera, officers were free to pretend they had forgotten to activate them or that the devices had simply malfunctioned.

That’s the bad news. Fortunately, PERF isn’t interested in ensuring body cam footage remains something more useful to the police and less useful to the communities they serve. It appears the forum is actually trying to increase accountability and repair relationships damaged by years of uncontrolled misconduct.

Its latest report [PDF] on body cameras contains a lot of discussion about officers’ access to recordings, especially when misconduct is suspected. But it opens up by noting how much has changed since its last report in terms of body cam uptake.

Much has changed in the ten years since that first convening. For one thing, the police use of body cameras has skyrocketed. In 2020, almost 4 in 5 (79 percent) local police officers worked in departments that used BWCs, and all departments serving 1 million or more residents reported using them. Sheriffs’ offices had similar increases in their use of BWCs, with more than two-thirds (68 percent) of sheriffs’ offices having BWCs in 2020. Even federal law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, have adopted this technology. And with high-profile police use-of-force incidents and in-custody deaths leading to demands for greater police accountability, the public has come to want—and expect—police officers to wear cameras.

PERF frames the controlled access to body cam recordings as something essential to an employer-employee relationship. Every entity with employees engages in performance reviews and disciplinary actions when an employee has screwed up. PERF argues cops shouldn’t be exempted from this normal part of employment. And it says agencies using body cams are best prepared to do this sort of thing properly… provided they’re actually willing to do the job properly. PERF suggests “Monday morning quarterbacking,” using questions like these to get to the root of observed problems:

• Is any of this consistent with how officers are trained?
• Should supervisors have been on scene, and should they have known how this specialized unit operated?
• These officers had body-worn cameras. Why might they have behaved this way when they knew they were being recorded?
• Why didn’t initial reports accurately reflect what was seen on video? Could officers’ statements have been aimed at fixing a narrative?
• What role do you think the culture of specialized units might have played in this incident?
• The agency has a “duty to intervene” policy. Why didn’t anyone intervene when they saw Mr. Nichols being beaten?
• The agency also has a policy requiring officers to render first aid. Did officers promptly render first aid in accordance with their training?

While police officials love to claim the public isn’t qualified to second-guess actions taken by officers, they — and the officers working for them — should be more than willing to engage in second-guesswork with the people they do believe are qualified to do so.

The report notes the suggestion it made in 2004 — that officers not be allowed to view footage before making reports or statements — received a lot of pushback. But, surprisingly, it appears many agencies are beginning to realize this is something that must be done to deter misconduct and improve the performance of the officers they employ.

Although nearly 90 percent of the policies PERF reviewed have been updated since BJA’s 2019 policy review, the only significant policy change over the four years has been a decline in the percentage of agencies that allow officers to view video of a critical incident before making a statement, from 92 percent in the BJA review to 56 percent in PERF’s review of 127 policies.

This is definitely a move in the right direction. It’s pretty tough to manage a workforce that’s allowed to alter its narrative before meeting with supervisors or investigators. Now, more than half of agencies utilizing body cams gather statements first before allowing officers access to their recordings.

It appears the most prominent obstacle to getting to 100% are law enforcement unions. But even those powerful entities are being recognized for what they are by the agencies whose workforce they represent: an impediment to improvement, accountability, and rebuilt community trust. Here’s what the Los Angeles Police Department experienced following its (early) adoption of the tech:

According to Commander Steven Lurie, union representatives were concerned about the impact of random audits on their membership, and the union’s support was pivotal in adopting the BWC program. As a result, LAPD does not currently permit random reviews, and it has permitted audits only to ensure compliance with activation and deactivation requirements and to monitor employees identified as high-risk by LAPD’s early-warning system.

However, pursuant to a 2023 audit that found officers were “routinely turning off their body worn cameras in violation of department policy,” Chief Michel Moore says he is “considering changing department policy to increase random review of body camera recordings that don’t involve arrests or the use of force.”

The report makes several policy recommendations for body cam use, ranging from activation to storage to access. But almost none of this is new. These were the same recommendations made a decade ago, when only a handful of agencies were beginning to implement the tech. A decade later, PERF has only altered one recommendation — a change prompted by changes made internally by nearly 40% of the agencies surveyed:

Officers involved in a critical incident should be interviewed before watching relevant BWC footage. During the “perceptual interview,” they should describe their perceptions (what they saw, heard, felt, believed, experienced before arriving, etc.) before, during, and after an incident. After the perceptual interview, officers should be given the opportunity to provide a video-informed statement by reviewing BWC footage and offering clarifications that they feel are appropriate.

This is the right way to go. And I’m glad to see several law enforcement agencies have gotten out ahead of this, rather than waiting for this to be forced on them by legislators or police accountability boards.