(10-11-21) JEFF BLOG – The Third Eye: Body Cameras and a Reluctant JPSO

By Kathleen Legendre, Jefferson Parish Democratic Executive Committee

 (At 7 to 8 p.m., Thursday Oct. 14, JPDEC will livestream on Jeff Talk a discussion about police body cameras. Our first guest will be Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joe Lopinto. New Orleans Attorney Scott Sternberg, an advocate for open government and open records, will also be interviewed.)

 Body cameras worn by police officers have stoked discussion nationally and internationally for over a decade – a complex issue with many tentacles, many questions:

Are cameras worth the added costs for police departments? Do they protect both police and citizens?  Help build community trust? Moderate overly aggressive police behavior? Research strongly suggests that the answer to these questions is … Yes.

 For us locally, beyond vague objections based on budgetary concerns, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office has not made clear why it hasn’t approved cameras and followed the lead of the Louisiana State Police, New Orleans Police Department, St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office, cities of Gretna and Westwego, plus others in our state and a majority of municipal law enforcement agencies across the country.

As for Louisiana, the legislature several years ago created the Law Enforcement Body Camera Implementation Task Force, which recommended that use of cameras should be decided by local law enforcement, not the legislature.  So even as evidence mounts that body cameras well serve the public and the police, JPSO remains on the fence, raising the question asked by many in our community -- why?  

Tony Farrar, executive fellow with the Police Foundation in Washington, D.C., and researchers Dr. Barak Ariel and Dr. Alex Sutherland of Cambridge University (UK) published findings seven years ago in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology that highlight how body cameras affect behavior in police and civilians. The study was done after Rialto, Cal., installed cameras on half of their officers for part of a year, then on the other half for the second part of the year.

A key finding over the 12-month period: “Use-of-force by officers wearing cameras fell by 59% and reports against officers dropped by 87% against the previous year’s figures.”  Most studies since then show that officers who use body cameras receive fewer complaints than those who don’t.

The third eye, robotically neutral, has tended to de-escalate tension. Researchers studying Rialto determined that cameras worn by police were “perhaps most effective at actually preventing escalation during police-public interactions: whether abusive behavior towards police or unnecessary use-of-force by police.”

According to the National Institute of Justice article titled Race, Trust and Police Legitimacy, published way back on Jan. 9, 2013:

“Research consistently shows that minorities are more likely than whites to view law enforcement with suspicion and distrust. Minorities frequently report that the police disproportionately single them out because of their race or ethnicity.” That view is rooted in infamous incidents and mountains of data related to treatment of black and brown people in our justice system – from police use of force to sentencing outcomes.

Seven states now mandate police body cameras -- Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Carolina. But Louisiana has touched ever so lightly on the topic. 

The State Senate in 2015, ’16 and ’17 passed bills creating and maintaining the Body Camera Task Force, which was directed to produce a written report detailing requirements for implementation of cameras, best practices for their use, and policies for access to and use of recordings. Yet little was accomplished, and the task force was not renewed. In 2016, the State Senate passed a bill that prohibits the release of body-worn camera footage that is found by the data custodian to violate a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy.

That’s where recent Louisiana legislation ends, although laws dating to the 1970s require public records to be stored at least three years and mandate that officials ordered by a court to turn over records (including body-camera video) must pay legal fees to anyone requesting them. State Rep. Rodney Lyons (D-Harvey) did manage to get a symbolic resolution through the House of Representatives this year, calling on Jefferson Parish to adopt cameras.

In 2021, the Saint Bernard Parish Sheriff’s Office began using them. So did Gretna, joining Westwego. Westwego Police Chief Dwayne (Poncho) Munch recently was quoted in The Advocate as saying, “We’re public servants. We should be accountable … there shouldn’t be any ‘he said, she said.’”

          Your move, JPSO.

 (To tune into the discussion at 7 p.m. Thursday, like the Jefferson Democrats’ Facebook page at https://tinyurl.com/JPDECfacebook. You will get a notification before the event starts.)