The Vancouver Police Department deserves praise for launching a pilot program for body and dash cameras for officers and patrol vehicles.
The pilot program, detailed in a Dec. 9 story by Columbian reporter Becca Robbins, entails a 60-day trial in which 10 officers and six police vehicles will be equipped with the cameras. The department might test a variety of vendors’ products before settling on the system it will buy. The goal is to have a departmentwide system in place by late spring.
It’s particularly heartening that the police department found itself with more than the 10 officers it needed to volunteer to test the equipment. Buy-in from rank-and-file officers is crucial to a body-camera program working as effectively as possible; Officer Ilia Botvinnik told Robbins he felt “like RoboCop” with the gadgets. The surplus of volunteers is allowing the department to outfit officers from a variety of units and shifts, which is a smart way to accurately assess the cameras’ pros and cons.
The pilot program is an important step in addressing the Vancouver Police Department’s efforts to improve transparency and accountability. Those who represent the city’s minority communities, and others, have been pushing for a body-camera system for some time. Those calls intensified after four fatal police shootings in 2019.
“I think it’s important to recognize these are not the final fix,” Ed Hamilton Rosales of the Southwest Washington League of United Latin American Citizens told KOIN-TV. “These are not going to stop police shootings. This will allow us to have a better control of accountability.”
Rosales is correct; body cameras are a tool to enhance transparency and accountability, and should not be viewed as a way to control officers’ behavior, nor as some insidious game of high-stakes “gotcha” with law enforcement. According to the April edition of The Crime Report, from the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College, a 2016 survey by George Mason University’s Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy found that 8.3 percent of prosecutors’ offices in jurisdictions with body-worn cameras had used the footage to prosecute police officers, while 92.6 percent had used it to prosecute private citizens.
Officers who wear body cameras consistently appear to have fewer complaints filed against them than officers without cameras, according to a 2020 report by the National Police Foundation that synthesized 10 years of research on the subject.
As Vancouver police advance a camera program, the Clark County Sheriff’s Office is stuck in a type of limbo after the failure of Measure 10 on the November ballot. Measure 10 asked voters to approve a 0.1 percent sales and use tax increase to benefit juvenile detention facilities, which in turn would have freed money in the county budget for the purchase and setup of a body-camera system. Voters apparently found Measure 10 confusing and rejected it.
The county council unanimously approved a body- and dash-camera program for the sheriff’s office in April. Regardless of the failure of Measure 10, it should make securing funding a priority. If the law allows, perhaps the 20 percent increase in sales tax revenue the county recorded in 2021 could be one place to start.
The Vancouver Police Department is blazing a positive path forward in its pursuit of a body- and dash-camera system. We hope the Clark County Council will soon find a way to help the sheriff’s office join that endeavor.
