Durham police body camera pilot gets the green light

By Joel Wittnebel/The Oshawa Express

A pilot project that will outfit approximately 80 Durham Regional Police Service officers with body-worn cameras has received the green light.

At the most recent meeting of the Police Services Board, the body-worn cameras (BWC) pilot project was approved at a cost of approximately $1.2 million. Over the coming months, two platoons in the DRPS West Division, approximately 50 frontline members, will be outfitted with the new BWC for the length of the pilot project, which is set to last one year. The pilot period will also include BWCs for approximately 10 members of the Traffic Enforcement Unit and officers involved in the Festive RIDE program in the winter months.

The pilot project

The BWC project has been ongoing since 2014 and over the course of the first three phases, which included background research and a public survey, the goal has been to determine if the BWC would provide value with respect to accuracy and the quality of evidence, the level of trust in the community toward police and enhancing accountability.

However, according to the DRPS report on the research progress, despite the amount of literature on the subject, the true value provided by BWC remains unclear.

“In spite of the considerable attention paid to the topic of police BWC in the popular media and a sizeable body of openly available literature on the subject many questions remain,” the report reads. “The evidence supporting the benefits of a BWC program is equivocal. The experiences of other police agencies in studying or deploying a BWC present insufficient evidence for our cost-benefit analysis or for making an evidence-based decision on a BWC program.”

For that reason, A/Sgt. Jason Bagg, the project manager for the DRPS BWC project, says the pilot deployment is the best option.

“To measure a change in those key measures, a deployment of this size is required,” he says.

The costs of the pilot project includes $125,000 for training (to last three to seven months), $75,000 for IT tech support, and $40,000 for contract workload studies. However, the largest costs will come in the form of overtime pay and extra staffing.

It’s estimated that officers will require approximately two hours at the end of a shift to catalogue and edit the footage from their BWC. For that reason, during the initial pilot, it’s estimated to cost an additional $400,000 of overtime pay.

The single largest cost will come on the video management and storage side of things related to the hiring of six additional civilian positions to process BWC evidence for use in court.

However, it appears there may also be additional dollars needed down the line.

“This costing only includes those new hard costs and does not address the soft costs of dedicated resources elsewhere,” Bagg says.

The numbers had Bonnie Drew, regional councillor from Scugog and member of the Police Services Board, a little concerned as there are currently no budgeted funds for the project.

“It’s in addition, something is going to have to give,” she said. “I’m not sure I can support going ahead with it this year. I would like to have some more information about regulations, and I would like to have some more information on where we’re going to stand financially.”

For Regional Chair Roger Anderson he says he is confident that the region could come up with the funds, and suggested that if the pilot program were to be delayed a year and begin in the fall of 2018, the budget requirement could be split between $600,000 in 2018 and the remaining half in the 2019 budget.

In 2017, the approved DRPS budget was $193 million.

It was previously estimated that if the BWC program were implemented in full, the inititial costs for the first year of the program would be approximately $24 million, with annual costs of approximately $17.8 million.

According to the police report on the BWC project, training could potentially begin this fall with the one-year deployment beginning in early or mid-2018.

In terms of the cameras and video storage software, DRPS will be taking advantage of an existing partnership and a free opportunity to reduce the costs of the pilot project.

For the cameras, they will be opting for a program offered by Axon Public Safety, one of the largest vendors internationally when it comes to BWCs. Under a new program the company is offering, they will provide BWCs and video management software at zero cost for a one-year project.

This fits well with the 2016 decision by DRPS to commence a digital evidence management pilot project with Axon’s Evidence.com platform, which will provide the method for delivering the BWC footage to the crown attorney’s office for use in court.

The opportunity had board member Stindar Lal a little skeptical, as by using Axon for the pilot project could open the door and provide the advantage to them when it came to procuring the BWCs for the entire force later on through any future public procurement process.

“Obviously the incumbent would have some knowledge,”  Bagg admits.

The report states however that the DRPS will provide any information available to Axon during the pilot project, to any other company looking to bid on the opportunity at a later date.

“Any future procurement would be separate and distinct from the pilot and would not favour or exclude Axon Public Safety Canada,” the document reads, adding that the BWC project had been in contact with a procurement specialist to ensure the process was okay. “The contractual arrangement with Axon Public Safety Canada proposed for the purpose of this pilot project will not prejudice any future procurement process.”

Fair warning

The decision to approve the BWC pilot project did not come without its stumbling blocks or its warnings.

Speaking during the meeting Durham Region Crown attorney Greg O’Driscoll told members of the board that the onslaught of future BWC footage will have serious impacts on his office, which is already strained by a recent Supreme Court decision.

That decision places strict and finite timelines on the length of certain cases and when they need to be resolved, allowing 18 months for all matters within the Ontario Court of Justice and 30 months for Superior Court matters.

And while O’Driscoll admits the availability of BWC footage can be helpful in certain circumstances and work to expedite guilty pleas, the sheer volume of footage and the obligation to share that video as part of disclosure to defence council, can be crushing.

“Our reality is that if this project (BWC) moves forward, it will absolutely add significantly to the complexity of the prosecution of any and all cases that involve this type of evidence,” he says, adding that those requirements will only add further strain to the Crown Attorney’s office that is struggling to keep up with new timelines.

“We’re facing great, great pressures,” O’Driscoll says. “We’re stretched to the limit.”

It was the same words of warning delivered by the Ministry of the Attorney General at an in-camera meeting in September of 2015, which called for “a cessation of BWC projects” until they had an chance to review the impacts of the Toronto Police Services BWC project on the court system. Those words led to DRPS hitting the pause button on its BWC project until November of 2016.

People of Durham want BWCs

The people have spoken, and a large majority of Durham residents would support seeing BWC on their police officers.

As part of the initial phases of the BWC project, a public survey was conducted both online and through random phone calls to allow DRPS to test the waters on how the people of Durham Region felt about BWCs. In total, 2,274 responses were received through the online survey and the results were clear.

Nearly 80 per cent of Durham residents said they supported the use of BWCs in Durham, while 76 per cent said they believe the cameras would create increased police accountability and 80 per cent of people believe they would provide better evidence.

And not only that, nearly three quarters of people surveyed (73 per cent) supported an increase in the DRPS budget to pay for the cameras.

In terms of concerns, the biggest worry for people was that the video would be leaked online, or to the media (55 per cent), while 43 per cent of people were concerned about the cost, while violating officer privacy (29 per cent) and violating citizen privacy (27 per cent) were other concerns.

For the phone survey, 400 responses were received and echoed the sentiments of those online respondents showing strong support for the cameras along with the belief they would provide better evidence and increase police accountability.

The end goal

“The footage is not going to be Hollywood footage,” says Chief Paul Martin. “It is about officer, public safety and getting the best evidence possible.”

And on that vein, the DRPS appears to be taking a proactive step, as the past instances of BWC projects are a case study in reactive planning.

In the United States, BWCs were implemented in some form or another in several cities spurred by clashes between the police and the public or some other violent incident or police practice.

In New York, the NYPD began using the cameras after a US Federal Court judge ruled the police forces “stop and frisk” practices were unconstitutional. In Ferguson, Missouri, following the police shooting of Michael Brown and the civil unrest that followed, then president Barack Obama created a task force to find a solution, which eventually offered support for the implementation of BWCs.

In Canada, there’s similar examples with PACER Report in 2012, following allegations of systemic racism and illegal “street checks” with the Toronto Police Service, it was recommended that the Toronto police begin exploring the option of equipping officers with BWCs.

With that said, the DRPS recognize they are ahead of the curve.

“The evidence obtained through this proactive initiative, taken ahead of any government mandate or requirement, will position the community, the Police Services Board and the DRP Command to respond, with facts, to any external pressure or resistance to or for a body-worn camera program.”