Though there are still impediments related to deploying body-worn cameras on all of Pittsburgh’s patrol officers, the one that is most vexing is the state’s Right-to-Know law.
This was one of the points that came out of the Balancing Safety, Justice and Privacy seminar hosted by Duquesne University’s Cyril Wecht Institute for Forensic Science and Law on Jan. 27.
About 100 individuals, mostly students, attended the presentations and panel discussion covering various issues raised by police wearing cameras.
Duquesne Law Professor John Rago summarized these in his opening, noting that for him, body cameras are about collecting evidence for use at trial, and a means to help restore confidence in the legal system and in police officers in the wake of police-involved shootings.
“They are not designed to monitor police behavior—that is a byproduct,” he said.
Rago then showed three examples of incidents captured by dashboard and body-worn cameras where police officers shot a suspect. The first, an Oklahoma officer killed a suspect in a car after stopping it for an expired tag. He was not charged despite violating protocol and escalating the situation. The second recording was of a Pennsylvania officer who shot an intoxicated individual who went to the wrong house trying to go home. She was charged with manslaughter. The last recording, from Texas, showed officers on a domestic call doing everything correctly—getting children out of the house, backing away from the individual with a knife, going outside before he came at them with a gun.
Of the five main hurdles he described to their deployment in Pennsylvania, two—communication and training for officers—are relatively easy to address. The others are less so. The first among these is the fragmented nature of police agencies under no central authority.
“There are 166 police agencies with 4100 officers and no one person in charge,” Rago said. “And that’s just in Allegheny County.”
Secondly, wearing body cameras inside a residence is currently a violation of the state wiretap law—because in Pennsylvania both parties must consent to recording a conversation. Rago noted that state Reps. Randy Vulakovich and Dom Costa—both in attendance—were among those working with the Office of Open Records and the American Civil Liberties Union to carve out an exception for body-worn cameras.
But, third, that had to be weighed against Right-to-Know law, balancing what would be made public in the case of an officer-involved shooting, how quickly, by whom and what would be redacted. That last point is important, which Pittsburgh Police Cmdr. Clarence “Ed” Trapp made clear in his presentation later.
“What if you enter a house with the camera on, and there is a someone hiding from an abusing spouse, or a child in a custody dispute,” he asked. “If that is made public, those people could be in danger. And in fact, there are incidents where people have been killed after the release of such evidence.”
He said lawmakers have to get the balancing act between transparency and safety correct because other jurisdictions rushed into approving body cameras in the wake of the Ferguson shooting without getting policy and state law right. Washington state’s Right-to-Know law is so broad that any individual can request anything and it must be turned over.
“And, there’s a guy out there who does just that. He sits in his basement making Right-to-Know filings and putting the video on YouTube, and making money from it,” said Trapp.
“Body-worn cameras have changed law enforcement more than anything since the two-way radio.”
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