KEVIN McDONALD Field Officer
Hidden danger of body-worn cameras RECENTLY, A LONG-SERVING AND RESPECTED SERGEANT (we’ll call him Bob, not his real name) resigned from the WA Police Force after enduring a lengthy internal investigation into his on-duty behaviour that was based solely on the evidence of body-worn camera (BWC) footage. The footage, downloaded from his partner’s BWC, was a compilation of different incidents stemming from his work as a supervisor on Nightsafe in the Northbridge precinct over a two-year period. In the absence of a complaint from any member of the public, Bob’s nomination as the subject officer of a historical BWC internal investigation was unusual. However, the practice is becoming more common. Through the blinkered lens of BWC, the conduct of police on the frontline is microscopically scrutinised, analysed and investigated. Instead of being a tool for individual professional development, investigations are often resulting in disciplinary outcomes. During his two-year tenure on Nightsafe, Bob dealt with more than 500 incidents involving move-on notices, use of force, arrests and prosecutions relating to matters flowing from drug dealing, alcohol and drug abuse, acts of violence and other anti-social behaviour.
Drawn from those 500-plus incidents, internal investigators gave Bob a week to review 10 hours of BWC footage from 34 events. He was then interviewed under compulsion for more than five hours and ordered to account for his actions. Though Bob was unable to clearly recall specific details, or parts of incidents, by watching the footage he did remember some and answered questions honestly and as best he could recollect. Given there was no complaint from any member of the public, no injury to any person, no witness statements, no other evidence and the passage of time, it became clear the procedural fairness of this process was, like the corroborating evidence in this matter, non-existent. An article published in the June 2016 edition of the Australian Police Journal highlighted some of the concerns associated with BWC:
EVIDENCE IS ONLY TWO DIMENSIONS
Given there was no complaint from any member of the public, no injury to any person, no witness statements, no other evidence and the passage of time, it became clear the procedural fairness of this process was, like the corroborating evidence in this matter, non-existent.
28 POLICE NEWS JUNE 2022
Video footage of a police-citizen encounter is a twodimensional rendition of a three-dimensional event. The human brain processes the movement of people and objects differently than does a digital recorder. People’s perception of what’s happening in a given moment can be affected by physiological conditions such as tunnel vision and auditory exclusion – two affects that video isn’t going to have the ability to illustrate. This means an officer’s memory of the incident may not reflect the story the video tells. This reinforces the need to write a detailed police report that describes everything the officer has experienced that may not have been caught on camera.
