As Connecticut lawmakers consider whether to fund a pilot program to help local police agencies acquire body cameras, Newtown’s local police department is in the final stages of completing its first elementary study on the new technology.

On March 20 the legislature’s Public Safety Committee endorsed a bill establishing a pilot program to help equip law enforcement personnel in one large, one medium, and one small state municipality with body cameras, and to generate data to study the outcomes for policing practices in order to establish future statewide standards.

Depending on the pilot outcome, the legislative proposal would also result in possibly developing statewide standards concerning the use of such cameras, including, but not limited to, the circumstances when a camera should and should not be operational, and evaluate the relative merits of different available technologies.

Police Chief Michael Kehoe told The Newtown Bee this week that his department is always looking for new ways and technologies to improve citizen-law enforcement relations.

“Education both ways is always good,” Chief Kehoe said regarding the prospect and possible detriments to employing body cameras.

He said many citizens believe that officer body cams, as the devices are generically called, are an extension of the dashboard cameras already in operation in all Newtown patrol vehicles.

But they are not.

“While the dash cam is capturing traffic stops and other incidents that are occurring in public, and only when they are activated, body cams are on all the time, and they accompany an officer wherever he or she goes, including into private homes and other locations,” he explained.

“Going into someone’s house, capturing a witness statement or speaking to a child or a resident with a medical issue are just a few of our concerns, and are probably of concern to most citizens as well,” Chief Kehoe said. “So if we’re considering this technology, we’re really going to have to craft policies and develop training to keep us off what might become a really slippery slope as far as privacy and protection of those being filmed is concerned.”

The local chief said statistics already prove that police wearing body cameras “dramatically reduces use-of-force complaints against police agencies.”

“We’re lucky to have a very professional police force here in Newtown, so we don’t get many of these complaints. But it’s a fact that when body cameras are used, cops say the community behaves better and community members say cops behave better,” he said.

Before any protocols or training regiments can be considered, however, there is the cost — not of the cameras themselves, but of all the “back office” labor and technology required to safely transfer and securely warehouse camera footage.

“There’s also the question of handling requests for reviews, and redaction when required. We may have footage that includes a sexual assault victim, a juvenile, or an individual with a clinical mental health condition,” Chief Kehoe said. “We also need the equipment and the expertise to handle that material.

“We understand the potential value of body cam data, but we also need to understand all the implications,” he added.

Body vs Dash Cams

When a Newtown officer on patrol activates the emergency light bar on his or her cruiser, the dash camera begins capturing footage until such a time that light bar is turned off. That means an officer could go an entire shift, or potentially days, without activating the dash cam.

The resulting video files from those cameras in any given week may be 10, 20, 50 minutes, or a few hours, Chief Kehoe said.

“But these body cams are on all the time, and would transfer to officers on each shift, so we’re talking as much as 20 or more hours of body cam footage every day. That presents a real storage challenge,” he said. “Sure we could contract to do body cam storage in ‘the cloud,’ but I’ve heard too many stories of cloud accounts being hacked to have complete faith that our residents would have the full benefit and privacy protection they require.”

The chief said the department is in the final stages of its first study, which in part will identify optional body cam models, implementation, and possibly ways to begin integrating the technology along with all the other equipment being used day to day by local officers.

But even discussing that raised further concerns.

“The vendors that support the body cam technology are not the same companies supporting our dash cams, or the surveillance cameras we use in the department, or in our interview rooms,” he said. “The technology between our dash cams and the storage server is pretty user friendly, but we don’t know if that will be the case with body cams.”

Any added responsibilities on the part of officers will have to be considered, particularly from a contract standpoint, Chief Kehoe said.

“If they have to spend additional time [downloading and administering] body cam files, what is that taking them away from doing?” he wondered.

There is also the cost of hardware, replacement equipment if a body cam is broken or malfunctions, and many other considerations Chief Kehoe sees his department and the local Police Commission considering in the coming months.

“Awareness of hidden costs is critical,” Chief Kehoe said, “but public discussion and awareness is also important. What do people think about a police officer coming into their home with a camera running?”