Washougal police chief says new body-worn cameras ‘improve civility’

WASHOUGAL — Washougal Police Chief Wendi Steinbronn says the department’s body-worn camera program has improved the civility of encounters, and helped mitigate and protect against frivolous complaints since its inception in June 2023.

“This isn’t a true story for all agencies, but for our agency, I think the camera system has improved civility on both sides,” Steinbronn said during a Monday Washougal City Council workshop. “People are remembering to be polite, or if they complain about something the officer said or did, we’re able to watch and immediately determine whether it happened or not.”

The department contracted with Arizona-based Axon starting in 2022 to provide the equipment for a body-camera program to meet new state requirements regarding recording custodial interviews.

The videos provide the best evidence for court cases, aid investigations of use-of-force incidents and citizen complaints, and assist in training, Steinbronn said.

“They also help improve the quality of detail and reporting,” she said. “If I’m going to write my report and I want to quote what someone said … I can just go back and look.”

The goals of the program are to document in-person law enforcement-related community contacts, promote public trust, ensure officer and public safety, improve transparency, enhance evidence collection and scene management, aid in prosecution and provide training feedback, according to Steinbronn.

“Most of the interactions where people complain about either courtesy or procedure, we’re able to go back and look at the camera,” Steinbronn said. “It’s been helpful.”

Washougal police currently has 23 cameras — 18 deployed — and has generated 8,180 working videos, 79 test videos and 160 training videos since June 2023.

“Everyone that’s working has been issued their own camera,” Steinbronn said.

Policy requires cameras to be activated in any of the following situations:

• All enforcement and investigative contacts, including calls for service, stops and field interviews;
• Traffic stops including, but not limited to, traffic violations, stranded motorist assistance and crime interdiction;
• Self-initiated activity in which a member would normally notify Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency;
• Any other contact that becomes adversarial in a situation that would not otherwise require recording.

“Basically, we have to turn it on when we have contact with the public that’s related to police work — when you’re checking on a suspicious person or suspicious auto,” Steinbronn said. “When I’m in Starbucks and people want to ask me a question, I don’t turn the camera on, but if the discussion kind of gets hostile and I think, ‘Oh, this is not going to a good place,’ then I can … activate it.”

Steinbronn said that the main concerns that Washougal police officers have heard from residents about the cameras are “that we’re sharing all the data that we can legally share, and that individual officers cannot tamper with or delete footage.”

“In fact,” Steinbronn said, “they don’t have permission to even delete if they wanted to, except for the admins. … If anything gets deleted, there is a lot of trail that shows what was deleted, and we are required by policy to enter notes as to why we did so. There’s no going in there and changing footage.”

The body-camera program was funded by a combination of grants and the 2022 Clark County public safety tax, which distributed revenue to cities for body-worn camera programs.

“The grant was only a two-year grant, so we had to spend the money by the end of this year,” Steinbronn said. “So … we paid off our contract.”