“Never in the history of law enforcement has there been a piece of equipment that has been pushed this hard and pushed by the public,” Herzog said. “It’s always been law enforcement driven, and that’s where it’s done and there’s research.”
Part of the challenge is that body cams are so new with so many unknown factors and variables about them, he said.
A recent use-of-force presentation by police at West Chester Activity Center taught residents about perceptions and what the camera shows and does not show, what an officer does remember and what an officer cannot remember based on the physiological stresses and effects of a use-of-force experience.
“It’s not that he’s lying,” Herzog said. “His perception is different.”
Body cams also involve privacy issues not yet resolved by courts, such as an officer being able to enter someone’s home.
“Right now I can,” Herzog said. “Well, then do you want your neighbor to turn around the next day and say, ‘I want that video. It’s public record.’ And that can happen.”
The pilot program approved by trustees involves testing actual equipment and will help determine if body cams are feasible option and the actual cost.
Presently, only one state requires cameras for law enforcement officers, Herzog said.
“The problem is, they have no idea how they’re going to fund it because agencies can’t afford the storage costs to maintain this,” he said.
The use of body cams, in general, has the potential to “drastically” change policing, Herzog said.
Without the public learning about how different angles can present an entirely different sequence of events, they tend to believe the one point of view presented via a body cam is precisely what happened, he said.
“It is so far from what happened because there’s different angles, there’s perception,” Herzog said.
The body cam study likely will be completed by year’s end, when he plans to present his findings to trustees, he said.
Since 2010, WCPD has provided de-escalation training to its officers so they might be able to implement different ways of handling a situation without using force, Herzog said.
The way the department conducts itself isn’t likely to go beyond “minimal change” if the township does end up implementing body cameras, he said.
“We have a very low number of complaints,” Herzog said. “They’ve continually went down. Our uses of force in the past five years have went down.”
Police department statistics show the department with 15 to 19 use-of-force incidents a year between 2009 and 2012, nine in 2013 and seven in 2014 out of thousands of arrests each year.
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