Portland, Oregon police to introduce body cameras this summer

(TNS) – Central Precinct officers grabbed body cameras and clipped them to their uniforms at the start of their shifts Monday, marking the beginning of a summer rollout of the cameras to officers in the FBI’s three precincts and special teams.

By the end of August, all patrol officers will be equipped with the cameras, making the Portland Police Bureau the last of the country’s largest municipal agencies to fully implement the technology.

The department says patrol officers in the Northern District will begin wearing them on July 15 and patrol officers in the Eastern District will begin wearing them in August. The rollout follows a 60-day pilot program that ended last October.

The bureau has installed the necessary recording and storage hardware in all three precincts, the training center and the Penumbra Kelly Building, where some of the police’s special units are based, city attorneys and Justice Department lawyers made the comments last month when briefing the judge overseeing the police bureau’s compliance with a settlement with federal court over excessive use of force by officers.

U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon recommended a decade ago that the city equip its officers with body cameras to hold them accountable.

The City Council voted in December to approve up to $10 million for Axon Enterprises to purchase and operate the camera program over five years.

The city and the Justice Department are still negotiating access to the camera footage. The federal department wants immediate access to the footage via evidence.com. The Justice Department also wants an independent monitoring team appointed by the court to have immediate access to the footage.

Under a policy the City Council passed in April 2023, the cameras will activate automatically when police officers turn on their car’s hazard lights, take out their stun guns or draw their weapons. They must manually turn on the cameras when they are dispatched to respond to calls, interact with people at protests, stop someone in a car or stop a pedestrian, conduct searches of cars or people and conduct certain interviews of juveniles in custody. They cannot film in a medical facility or when interviewing victims of sexual violence unless the person consents.

A negotiated policy also sets different requirements for when officers can view the footage, depending on the level of force they used and whether an officer used force or witnessed the force.

Under the agreement, officers who use deadly force cannot view their camera recordings until they provide an audio recording of their initial statement to internal investigators within 48 hours. This applies to cops who fire weapons, use chokeholds or hit someone in the head, neck or throat with a hard object, as well as when someone dies in their custody.

During this statement, officers must describe the call, what they observed, what threat they faced, whether they used warnings or de-escalation tactics, what force was used, and whether they provided medical assistance.

Additionally, Internal Investigations investigators may not view camera footage until the officer who used force has made his or her initial statement. However, Internal Investigations investigators may view the camera footage of officers who witnessed the use of force before interviewing them.

After an initial statement, there will be a break in the internal hearing during which the investigators, the officer involved and his lawyer will have the opportunity to view the camera recordings of the officer involved separately.

“Within a reasonable time,” the policy states, internal investigators may proceed with the recorded interview and ask the officer to clarify any discrepancies between the original statement and what the camera recordings show.

An agreement reached with the union states that officers cannot face disciplinary action for an allegation of misconduct based on discrepancies or inconsistencies between the original statement and what is seen in the footage unless the city can prove that the officer was dishonest or attempted to deceive investigators.

Under the policy, supervisors can review body camera footage in connection with a complaint or as part of a debriefing of an officer’s use of force. In addition, they “must” review three instances in which a body camera was used on each officer to evaluate their performance annually.

The Justice Department had previously expressed concern that the body cam policies appeared to only give supervisors the ability to review three body cam recordings per year and did not allow them to view live video feeds from officers’ cameras.

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