Athens police units say they don’t have dashboard cameras for their cruisers, let alone lapel cameras.
Athens Police Chief Tom Pyle can remember one night when a cruiser camera didn’t serve him well.
As an APD lieutenant in the late 1990s, Pyle pulled into the Athens County Fairgrounds and came across a man in such a drunken stupor he was passed out behind the wheel of his crashed car. Pyle saw this as an opportunity to film the arrest with a newly acquired cruiser camera.
But when he got back to the office, the footage appeared to tell a different story.
“Three officers that were working for me that night looked at it and said ‘Man, lieutenant, why’d you slam him up against that car?’” Pyle said, adding that he merely grabbed the inebriated subject to keep him from falling during the arrest.
APD has since done away with dashboard cameras and Ohio University Police Department hasn’t had them for at least ten years.
Pyle’s experience is, in part, why Athens won’t see police officers wearing lapel cameras anytime soon.
“Video can show the basics, but it cannot give you the perception of the officers at that time.” Pyle said.
Support for police use of lapel cameras has peaked in recent weeks, after 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot dead by an officer in Ferguson, Missouri early last month. A number of police departments throughout the United States have since tested out the miniature cameras to boost accountability.
“This job is not a popular one, it’s the most unappreciated field that any person could ever get into; it’s also the most rewarding,” Pyle said. “I think people that specifically get into law enforcement appreciate the reward and can tolerate the disdain.”
Mayor Paul Wiehl said the city doesn’t have the money to buy wearable cameras. Two wearable cameras — AXON Flex and AXON Body — displayed on TASER International’s website have price tags of $599 and $399, respectively.
Lt. Tim Ryan, OUPD’s head of criminal investigations, said his department has loosely considered wearable cameras, but it hasn’t initiated any definitive plans.
For the time being, Ryan said, OUPD has supervisors ensuring proper conduct from its officers.
“We always take any complaints that come in from the community,” Ryan said. “We never turn the complaint away.”
He also said officers file an incident report any time they use force while on patrol. The report is then forwarded up the chain of command for review.
“It’s sort of our own internal control,” he said.
Ryan agreed with Pyle’s belief that cameras sometimes do not depict an incident’s full story.
Although Kelly Faust, an assistant professor of criminology at OU, doesn’t necessarily disagree, she supports using wearable cameras.
“It’s not a perfect idea,” she said “There are still things to overcome, but I think the idea that footage can be selectively shot should not be something that scares us away from this.”
Faust said it’s important to have what she called a “documented record” of what happened in any interaction an officer has. She pointed to studies that show positive effects of cameras on police forces.
The Rialto Police Department in California conducted a trial study of the use of wearable cameras on its officers from 2011 to 2013. The results showed an 87.5 percent decrease in officer complaints over two years and a 59 percent reduction in uses-of-force when officers began using the cameras.
“I think there’s a tendency to focus on the negative side that can come out of recording police officers,” Faust said. “Just as easily it can be used to show that the police here at Ohio University are doing a great job, or the police in a certain area are doing a good job with certain types of cases.”
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