They were meant to reassure us. The little square cameras on the chests of thousands of officers across the city were meant to show us that there would be a record of every meaningful interaction between police and the public, and especially those where cops use force. When Mayor de Blasio ordered the expansion of body-cams to every officer and detective, he promised it would make the city “fairer, faster and grow trust between police and communities.”
But a question always lingered: What would happen with the video? After years of delays, the public finally got an answer last month, and the reformers were outraged. The NYPD’s two-page operations order lists more than a dozen factors for whether video should be released. In other words: pure discretion.
A discretionary policy isn’t always a bad thing, but it depends on who gets the discretion. Here, the person choosing whether or not the public will benefit from the release of the bodycam video is the police commissioner himself.
Even those who support Commissioner Jimmy O’Neill or his just-named successor Dermot Shea should see that they have a clear conflict of interest.
If body-cams are sold to the public as a mechanism for police accountability, it cannot be the police who choose when images are released. The incentive to hide bad data and show favorable depictions will always be too powerful.
The new policy does have a few clear requirements, but they only protect officers’ privacy, not the public’s right to know. It requires the NYPD not to disclose bodycam video while a use of force investigation is ongoing. So when a member of the public is accused of a crime, it’s fine to share their video. But when an officer is accused of beating a bystander, suddenly it’s unfair to share the video while the case is ongoing?
The dilemma shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Earlier this year, the Civilian Complaint Review Board said that approximately 40% of requests for bodycam video were unfulfilled. Alarmingly, in more than 100 cases, the NYPD falsely claimed there was no video when there actually was some.
Bodycams have real promise, but the key lies in the details. When hundreds of protesters took to the streets in opposition to the hiring of 500 new MTA officers to target fare evasion last week, I joined their call. But when some opponents highlighted the lack of bodycams on these same officers, I wasn’t willing to join in.
Even if each and every one of those MTA officers had bodycams, it would still raise the exact same questions we see with the NYPD: Who controls the images? Until we have a clear answer, there is simply no way to know if these cameras will be a tool of police accountability or the latest form of mass surveillance.
Sadly, bodycams’ privacy impact may get a lot worse. At a time when cities across the country are banning face recognition, noting that it’s biased against communities of color and deeply invasive, New York is its biggest booster.
Not only do bodycams give the NYPD a growing array of video surveillance on the public, but they could become a new tool to advance face-recognition technology. Left unchecked, there is no law that would prevent the NYPD from using each and every bodycam to monitor New Yorkers’ movements across the city.
Following the lead of California, which recently passed a statewide ban on bodycam facial recognition, state Sen. Brad Hoylman authored a measure that would go even further for New York’s police bodycams. That’s an essential step forward. We must go further and ensure that an independent agency controls NYPD bodycam data going forward.
No government agency should be allowed to police itself.
Cahn is the founder and executive director of The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.), a New York-based civil rights and privacy group and a fellow at the Engelberg Center for Innovation Law & Policy at N.Y.U. School of Law.