Privacy, civil rights groups push rules for police body cameras

A group of civil rights and privacy organizations has released principles it thinks law enforcement officers should abide by while using body cameras.

The American Civil Liberties Union, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, NAACP and the privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation all signed on to the standards, as more agencies around the country adopt wearable cameras in light of recent shootings involving police officers and civilians.

{mosads}The five principles include having law enforcement set clear policies for how to record the footage, how to save it and how to provide it to the public.

“While some types of law enforcement interactions … may happen off-camera, the vast majority of interactions with the public — including all that involve the use of force — should be captured on video,” the groups said. “Departments must also adopt systems to monitor and audit access to recorded footage, and secure footage against unauthorized access and tampering.”

The groups said these policies should be developed in view of the public “with the input of civil rights advocates and the local community.”

Reflecting the concerns of privacy advocates, the groups said law enforcement agencies should have “narrow and well-defined purposes” for using the cameras and the video they collect, noting the privacy concerns posed by facial recognition software  combined with the ubiquitous cameras.

They also said the footage should be readily available to defendants captured on video, subjects of videos who are filing a  complaint against police or the family members of people whose deaths are captured by a body camera.

Officers should not be able to view video of an incident before filing their own reports on the events caught on tape, the groups said. This, they said, will ensure that an officer doesn’t inadvertently report an inaccurate story because of what he or she sees in the video of an encounter.

The announcement by the groups — 34 in total as well as an individual — are part of a larger debate over the use of the cameras in the wake of several high-profile civilian deaths at the hands of police.

In particular, the debate began after the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Body camera manufacturers have seen an uptick in sales and expect to reap benefits from the continued and increasing use of the systems that archive the video collected from the cameras.

Lawmakers have been backing measures to get more of the cameras on the streets, and President Obama has requested funding for 50,000 new body cameras as part of a larger effort to reform policing.