A national civil rights organization is leveling criticism at St. Paul and Minneapolis police body camera policies, along with those of several other law enforcement agencies round the nation.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, along with Upturn, released an updated scorecard this week, which evaluates body camera policies for 75 cities. The group added St. Paul to its review; Minneapolis was included previously.
“As more police departments utilize body-worn cameras, they must not be taken as the last word for police accountability,” said Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference in a Tuesday statement.
“Our scorecard shows that many police departments are failing to adopt adequate safeguards for ensuring that constitutional rights are protected, and our report shows that unrestricted footage review places civil rights and liberties at risk and undermines the goals of transparency and accountability,” Gupta continued. “Without carefully crafted policy safeguards in place, there is a real risk that body-worn cameras could be used in ways that threaten civil and constitutional rights and intensify the disproportionate surveillance of communities of color.”
In 2015, a coalition of civil rights, privacy and media rights organizations released a list of their principles for law enforcement using body cameras. The scorecard, released Tuesday, is based on those principles.
St. Paul officers began wearing body cameras in September.
Before they did, the police department held dozens of community meetings for more than a year, met with advocacy groups and victims, researched best practices and “developed a policy that works for both our department and our community,” said Steve Linders, a St. Paul police spokesman.
“We worked very hard to craft a policy to reflect the values we share with our community, and that includes transparency, protecting victims’ rights, protecting the integrity of investigations, officers’ rights and other factors,” Linders said. As with all the department’s policies, they re-examine and adjust as needed, he said.
Of eight principles, the Leadership Council and Upturn’s scorecard for St. Paul and Minneapolis said both met the principles of having body camera policies that are publicly and readily available, and that limit officer discretion on when to record.
But the review gives poor grades to most departments in other areas — it says four of 75 departments around the country “expressly allow people who are filing police-misconduct complaints to view all relevant footage” and only seven departments place any limits on the use of facial recognition with their camera systems. Neither St. Paul nor Minneapolis are on either list.
And none of the policies requires officers to write incident reports before watching relevant footage, the scorecard said.
Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo said they “have not seen any major concerns or issues with” officers reviewing body camera footage “to try to write reports as accurately as possible.”
Both St. Paul and Minneapolis police said they are not using facial recognition technology with body cameras.
Minneapolis police are approaching the first year of having fully rolled out body cameras. They’re working internally and with an audit committee to look at best practices, according to Arradondo.