Portland police officers begin wearing body cameras

The city of Portland has had the dubious distinction of being the only city of its size where police officers do not wear body cameras. Last spring, the police union and the city came to an agreement to move forward with body-worn cameras. Now, 150 officers are wearing them in a 60-day pilot project that began this week. OPB’s Jonathan Levinson joins us with details.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. For years, the city of Portland has had the dubious distinction of being the only American city of its size in which police officers don’t wear body cameras. Last spring, the police union and the city came to an agreement to finally move forward with body cams and now some of those cameras are being deployed. 150 officers are wearing them as part of a 60-day pilot program that began this week. OPB’s Jonathan Levinson joins us with the details. Good to have you back.

Jonathan Levinson: Hey, Dave.

Miller: So conversations about body cams by Portland Police have been going on for a long time. What have the sticking points been?

Levinson: Yeah, it’s been an incredibly long time. A federal judge has been pushing the city to do this for almost 10 years. Portland is still the largest municipal police department in the country that doesn’t use them.

Here’s a little bit of background. The US Department of Justice sued the city in 2012 alleging police routinely use excessive force against people in mental health crises. That led to a settlement agreement in 2014 with the Department of Justice and the city which mapped out a long list of reforms around use of force. Since 2014, the judge overseeing this agreement has been saying the city should adopt body cameras. The police union has been insisting on policies which would allow officers who use deadly force to review their camera footage before writing reports. It’s a policy known as pre-review, and a lot of cities allow it. But thinking has kind of changed. There’s maybe more appetite from policymakers to be a little more rigorous with police oversight. It’s increasingly considered sort of best practice to have officers write their report first, then view the footage and if necessary, they can write an addendum.

Momentum in Portland to finally get body cameras built in recent years, but still even allowing for a one-year pandemic in the contract negotiations in 2020, it took the city and union two years of negotiating to come to the agreement they finally did.

Miller: And it seems like that one of the second points was the policies around how they’ll be used. What did the city finally settle on?

Levinson: Right. So it’s a bit of a compromise. For incidents where someone dies, the involved officers–if someone gets shot for example–will give an on scene statement to their supervisor and then within 48 hours, they need to give a recorded interview to internal affairs. Only then can they view the body camera footage and so the sort of catch in this and what makes this a little weird is that the Internal affairs officers will also be prohibited from viewing the footage before that interview. Once they’ve done the interview, everyone will take a break, watch the footage and then resume the interview and the officer can offer clarifications on any discrepancies. This doesn’t apply to witness officers who will be allowed to view their footage before giving their statements. And also for lower levels of force, things like pepper spray using a police dog, officers will give a recorded statement to their supervisor at the scene before viewing their footage and writing the report.

Miller: It sounds like they tried to thread the needle a little bit here.

Levinson: [Laughter] Yeah, I think that’s true. Portland’s solution has been called a little bit unusual. I think the city can mostly count this as a victory with a quiet assist from the federal prosecutors in the settlement agreement. The DOJ said that they reserve the right to review and approve whatever policies the city and union agreed to and the DOJ has been adamantly against pre-review so that kind of loomed over these negotiations and it might still be an issue, right? The federal prosecutors involved in the settlement agreement they signed off on the policies for this pilot program but said they don’t fully meet their requirements. For example, they want supervisors to be able to remotely view officers’ cameras and randomly review footage for performance evaluations, but the current agreement doesn’t allow remote viewing and supervisors can only randomly pull three videos for evaluations.

And then just last week in court, Justice Department lawyers said they want immediate access to the footage for both themselves and the city office that’s charged with police oversight. The union objected to that in court so it’s going to have to get hashed out before the final policies are agreed upon.

Miller: Even after all this time, the city is still just starting with a pilot program. Why?

Levinson: Well, they’ve hammered out these policies, but it’s still a pretty big program to roll out. There’s a lot of new technology involved. Officers need to be trained on how to use them, when to use them. So the pilot is sort of to iron out these details, figure out work flow glitches, what works, what doesn’t, so that they’re ready to field them to the rest of the department.

Miller: What’s the pilot actually going to look like?

Levinson: Officers assigned to the central precinct, the neighborhood response team, the bike squad and the bureau’s gun violence team are going to wear them. Like you mentioned, that’s about 150 officers in total and it’s gonna run through October. Basically officers are required to start recording when they’re dispatched to a call. The cameras also automatically start recording if an officer turns on their lights and sirens or draws their firearm and that will also activate any cameras within 100 ft. There are situations in which an officer can stop recording, for example, if they’re interviewing victims of sexual assault or child abuse. But if they do that, they have to say on the recording why they’re stopping it and then they can’t be edited, they’re automatically uploaded to the cloud and the system logs everybody who views it.

Miller: The police and the public in general seem to have different reasons for wanting body cameras. What did the two sides see as the best reasons for wearing them?

Levinson: Some experts who study body cameras, who I’ve spoken to, have said there’s a little bit of tension between what the public wants and what the police want and it might actually be a result of marketing. The companies who make these cameras tell police agencies that their technology will help protect against frivolous complaints. And at the same time, they sort of market to the public that these are valuable accountability tools. That may be true, but from what I’ve heard here in Portland, I think the police and the public both hope the body cameras will provide a sort of a more authoritative account of events when something like a police shooting takes place.

Right now, unless a member of the public records it, the only versions we get are what the police say happened and if there was a witness, what the witnesses say. So the police, I think, hope this will bolster their credibility and help foster trust and maybe a more skeptical public hopes the cameras will improve accountability, but I think that’s sort of two sides of the same coin.

Miller: Do cameras actually provide what people want them to?

Levinson: That is a great question. It’s one that has strangely been absent from a lot of the discussion and the answer is kind of, right? Portland is very behind here. Body cameras have been around for a long time now and have become pretty standard because of that there’s a growing body of research showing that the results are kind of mixed. One study showed that use of force incidents decrease after an agency starts using cameras, but over time they return to their original levels. Another step study found that lots of cases progress through courts faster if there’s body camera footage. And for traffic cases and so-called person cases that’s like assault or robbery, those cases are actually less likely to return guilty verdicts if there’s body camera footage.

Experts I’ve spoken to who have studied these cameras and their impacts say they’re helpful, but they also caution that just because you can play a video in slow motion or watch it dozens of times and sort of key in on a detail, doesn’t mean that an officer could have done the same thing in real time and so you have to be kind of careful with how you view this footage. It all comes down to implementation. They say for the system to work, it has to be transparent and credible. If police, for example, try to undermine the footage when it suits their needs and then lean on video when it helps their narrative, they lose a lot of their impact as a trust building or accountability tool.

Miller: How have police unions in Portland and in other places influenced how body cams are used?

Levinson: The unions are hugely influential. Negotiating these policies with the union and that was the single hurdle preventing the city from adopting the cameras in the first place. Nationally, labor boards have repeatedly sided with unions that they have the right to negotiate how these cameras are used. Just a few days ago, the New York Times reported that a lot of police unions use the negotiations for body camera policies as leverage to get pay raises. That wasn’t explicit in this most recent Portland Police contract, but they did get sizable raise and retention bonuses, though.

Miller: So what is Portland’s timeline now? I mean, as we’ve been talking about, this is called a pilot.

Levinson: Right. The pilot runs through October 19th and then they expect to field them to all the roughly 300 patrol officers over the course of several months next spring and summer. That all hinges on training timelines, negotiating final policies with the Union and getting the Department of Justice on board.

Miller: And just briefly, I mean, how different is what we’re talking about in Portland from what cities of similar size are doing.

Levinson: It varies widely. Atlanta officers there who use deadly force are prohibited from viewing their footage, lower levels of force, they have to write a report first. In Seattle, officers who use force have to write their report first. And if an officer kills someone, footage is actually released to the public within 72 hours. San Francisco has similar policies, but in Sacramento, Austin, Salt Lake City and many other cities, officers can view their footage first and then write the report after.

Miller: Jonathan, thanks very much.

Levinson: Thanks for having me, Dave.

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