Modesto police out in front on body cameras

Before police body cameras became a forefront issue for politicians, civil rights groups and law enforcement agencies around the nation, Modesto officers were using them.

Before body cameras even existed, Chief Galen Carroll understood the benefit of recording an officer’s interactions with the public.

When people ask what he thinks about body cameras, “I point to that newspaper article that is hanging on the wall behind me,” he said during an interview in his office last month.

“Falsely accused officer wins case,” reads the Long Beach Press-Telegram headline on the yellowed article inside a black frame behind Carroll’s desk.

The story is about him – the product of a lawsuit in which a woman accused him of assaulting and raping her when he was a rookie cop in the late 1990s.

Carroll turned on a personal audio tape recorder while driving the woman to the police station, which captured her threat that she would lie and say he raped her. The tape recording was key evidence in the civil trial in which Carroll prevailed, winning a counterclaim against the woman for defamation.

The push for body-worn cameras came after a series of controversial officer-involved shootings beginning in August 2014 with the fatal shooting of a young man in Ferguson, Mo.

Carroll and other proponents of body-worn cameras will tell you that they provide more safeguards for officers falsely accused of misconduct than they substantiate citizen complaints.

“The (previously) most vocal opponents of the cameras now don’t want to go into the field unless they have one because they have helped them or saved them (from false accusations) before,” Carroll said. “The culture of being afraid of cameras is pretty much gone.”

He cites one case in which witnesses heard a suspect yelling for the officer to stop beating him. When they eventually saw him, his face was covered in blood and there was a pool of it on the ground.

At face value, it looked like a clear case of police abuse and the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People got involved on behalf of the black suspect.

But the video from the officer’s body camera showed a very different story. While running from the officer, the suspect rounded a corner, slipping and smashing his face into an electrical box. Down on the ground, he pulled a glass methamphetamine pipe from his pocket and shattered it on the ground, cutting his hand. The only force the officer used was a few strikes with his nightstick to the suspect’s hands to prevent him from reaching into his pockets.

While cameras also may verify actions that require officers to undergo additional training or discipline, Carroll said, most of the time, they protect them.

Other top cops in the area say body cameras are inevitable, and a few agencies already have followed in Modesto’s footsteps, or soon will.

California State University, Stanislaus, police started using them six months after Modesto did.

California Highway Patrol officers could begin wearing the cameras in a pilot program by Jan. 1, under legislation moving through the budget process at the Capitol.

The measure would require the CHP to create a policy considering minimum specification for cameras and rules for sharing data recorded on cameras.

The Ripon Police Department finalized its policy last month and started using cameras Saturday.

“It’s the unblinking eye,” Ripon police Lt. Steve Merchant said about the cameras. “It’s nobody’s slant, it’s nobody’s bias, it’s just what happened.”

The Ceres Police Department has installed the software that will store the video and plans to implement its policy and roll out the program by August.

Senate Bill 175 would require every law enforcement agency that uses body-worn cameras to implement a policy on their use, determining issues such as when the officer is expected to turn on the camera, who has access to the video, how long it is stored and how the department will respond to public-records requests.

Administrators in agencies that don’t already have the cameras are considering the same questions, as well as keeping an eye on other legislation that might affect how they implement programs in the future.

The most controversial, Assembly Bill 66, sought to insert state guidelines into every department’s body-worn cameras policy that would dictate, among other things, when the officer should use the cameras; require them to notify people they were being recorded; and prohibit officers from reviewing the footage before giving a statement after an incident of force.

Stanislaus County Sheriff Adam Christianson opposes the bill, which is waiting in committee. His department does not use the cameras but is researching the possibility.

Christianson called it “a knee-jerk reaction to things that are happening elsewhere in the nation. ... It’s not going to get rammed down my throat, and it’s not going to get imposed on me by some state legislator who doesn’t know the first thing about policing a community.”

Language that would have prohibited an officer from viewing the footage after using force was removed in April. For now, it is at the discretion of the agency to decide when and how the cameras will be used.

Ceres police likely will have the most lenient policy in the area concerning when an officer should activate his camera. Lt. Chris Perry said officers will be encouraged but not required to turn on the cameras while investigating any major crime or traffic stop.

Modesto, Ripon and university police, on the other hand, are expected to use the cameras during just about every contact with the public, with exceptions such as giving directions to someone or buying a cup of coffee.

“Sometimes you get out of a car and your first order is to handle the situation and you forget to turn it on, but you need to have a good justification for why you didn’t record something,” Carroll said.

With hundreds of hours of video recorded by his officers each day, he said, no one is tasked with reviewing it on a regular basis. But if a citizen complains about an incident for which there is no video or an attorney requests video that doesn’t exist, the officer will be asked to explain. If that happens repeatedly, the officer could become the subject of an internal affairs investigation.

Modesto’s original policy in 2012, like Ceres’, gave the officer more discretion over use of the camera, but Carroll said that created more speculation when video was absent in an investigation.

“My biggest fear is that we have a critical incident that isn’t recorded because the officer didn’t turn on the camera or the camera malfunctioned,” Carroll said.

The cameras have proved to be a great tool in investigating use-of-force incidents, Carroll said.

Modesto’s policy allows the officers to view footage of an incident, but in the event of an officer-involved shooting, Carroll said, he wants the officer to first give a statement to investigators.

“A lot of (an) officer-involved shooting is state of mind,” Carroll said. “I want your state of mind at the time of the shooting, not what your state of mind is after watching the video.”

For just about any other call, officers are free to watch the video immediately after a call on a Samsung Galaxy, and many of them use it to write their reports.

Merchant said Ripon officers will be able to do the same but must first get permission from a supervisor.

Ceres officers will be able to view any of the footage upon uploading it at the end of their shift, Perry said.

While Ceres officers are told to use their judgment about when to record, Perry thinks officers will use them more often than not and he fears the department will outgrow its system quickly.

Ceres is storing all its data in-house because the department doesn’t have the funds to pay an outside vendor like Modesto does, Perry said.

Modesto pays about $18,000 for storage each year. But Carroll said the department was given a steep discount for being the testing site for one of Taser’s first large rollouts in the nation, which came with technical challenges. He estimates the department soon will be paying close to $50,000 a year.

Cost is the biggest obstacle for most agencies.

Christianson estimates it will cost as much as $400,000 for the Sheriff’s Department to implement the program, not to mention the ongoing costs for storage and personnel to manage the video.

Carroll said he needed more staff than originally anticipated to handle video requests by attorneys.

Three crime-scene technicians spend about 30 hours a week processing some 70 videos for use in court, he said.

There always will be challenges in implementing large-scale changes such as a body camera program, Carroll said, but they are just the latest advancement in a profession that is constantly evolving with new laws and court decisions.

“I guess the best way I can look at any of the issues that has people standing on the edge of the pool of what will be the future of policing is this: You can stand on the edge and worry about every possible thing you might encounter when you jump in the pool ... because you really don’t want to go swimming, Carroll said. “To me, the benefits of the body cameras far outweigh any and all the reasons not to protect your city, department, officers and citizens by not having the cameras.”

This story was originally published July 4, 2015 at 4:13 PM with the headline "Modesto police out in front on body cameras."