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COTTONWOOD HEIGHTS — As police departments across the country move toward the new age of body cameras, one Utah police chief is offering some potential cautions about their use — including that they may not catch all that officers see and feel during a given circumstance.
“It gives you one point of view,” Cottonwood Heights Police Chief Robby Russo said Tuesday.
Russo characterizes body cameras as a “good idea,” and his department is in the process of selecting a system it will use in the future, but he also outlined several “complicated” issues that may surface on the “back end” for police departments — including costs, privacy and public access.
“I think you start by coming up with good policy,” Russo said Tuesday. “That includes when the cameras are activated, how long you retain that footage, who has access to the footage; and then you start buying the cameras and find a way to properly subsidize it.”
What body camera video shows versus what an officer perceives is another potential challenge, Russo noted.
In a blog posted to the Cottonwood Heights city website, Russo referenced quotes from Force Science Institute executive director Bill Lewinski that suggest a camera doesn’t follow an officer’s eyes or see as the officer sees, and that “tactile cues” including resistive tension, though difficult to capture on camera, are important for officers in deciding when to use force.
“Because you can’t feel what the officer is feeling at the scene, you might think they’re being overly aggressive when, in fact, they’re taking an appropriate course of action,” Russo said.
Officer Casey Davies, Cottonwood Heights Police Department’s defensive tactics coordinator, ran me through several different arrest scenarios Tuesday while wearing a camera attached head-level on a helmet.
In one instance, as I posed as a would-be arrestee, a push to my back looked much stronger from the body camera view than a side view with a professional-grade television camera.
Adding that to the context that I was resisting, and the officer was pushing me to create added distance in case I "attacked," lent a different perspective on the encounter.
“You’ll feel that — that tightening in the muscle groups, or you’ll feel them make that movement that might not necessarily be caught on the camera, and the officers will react,” Russo said.
Davies explained the encounter from an officer’s point of view.
“Once you start resisting and making any other efforts to do other than what I’m telling you to do, I’m thinking something is going to happen,” Davies said.
“The normal, ‘average Joe’ citizen is not going to resist. He’s under arrest. I told him he’s under arrest. I have the authority to arrest him," he continued. "There’s no reason that you should be resisting, other than you’re trying to run away from me, or you’re trying to hurt me.”
Russo also observed that what a body camera sees in low-light conditions is different from what a human sees.
“In a nighttime setting, somebody might pull out something like a cellphone or a comb or something the officer might perceive as something else,” he said.
Body cameras do not reveal everything that is in the officer’s field of view, the chief said.
“The camera won’t catch all of these other threats that could be coming toward you; and sometimes the officers will see that and the camera necessarily won’t move,” Russo said.
The police chief said he welcomed lawmaker input and he would support a workable policy on body camera use that helps to standardize protocols on issues like when departments should release body camera video, how long agencies should store the video, and when officers should turn on cameras during encounters.
Those familiar with a pending bill on Utah’s Capitol Hill said Tuesday the legislation was being still being developed, but that it would in theory create a set of parameters to help make police department policies more consistent across the state of Utah.
