Fifteen years after the first police department in San Diego County experimented with body-worn cameras, and 10 years after protests in Ferguson, Missouri, spurred national interest, the technology has become vital to modern-day law enforcement operations.
In the years since Ferguson, a fierce debate about transparency in law enforcement has led to rapid expansion of the use of body-worn cameras by police and sheriff’s departments. And with this increased use has come unanticipated challenges — determining which videos should be reviewed immediately, followed by the need to securely store millions of clips at increasing cost.
And now there’s a new challenge — a controversial artificial intelligence program being used to review the mountains of video and audio.
The first cameras worn by police in San Diego County and possibly in the entire country came before Ferguson in 2009. Escondido Police Lt. Craig Miller recalls, “I had bought a little tiny micro action camera that was designed for people to throw on their mountain bike or to film a bungee jump.” The $60 camera impressed his captain, so the department began testing half a dozen cameras.
“Within about three or four weeks, we captured an officer-involved shooting on video, and the department was sold,” Miller said.
Today every police agency in San Diego County uses body-worn cameras except for the California Highway Patrol. The CHP has finished testing them in Stockton and Oakland, and has received the funding needed to roll out body cameras statewide in 2025.
Currently in San Diego County there are 5,305 law enforcement officers using 4,152 body-worn cameras, costing in excess of $5 million a year. The largest number of cameras are owned by the San Diego Police with 1,863. The smallest number is for the Coronado Police with just 53 cameras — one for each of its officers.
San Diego Police spokesman Lt. Daniel Meyer sums up the current view of most law enforcement, which has come to embrace the cameras.
“Transparency is key to the success of modern-day policing and BWC’s are one of many very important tools in that pursuit, ” Meyer said. “BWC’s hold the public and law enforcement accountable.” He added that the cameras are “vital to modern-day police operations.”
Research on the use of body-worn cameras has grown rapidly, and an April 2023 analysis of 30 studies by different law enforcement agencies found “statistically significant reductions in use of force” in 14 studies and overall “the current body of research suggests that police BWCs can lead to reductions in use of force by police.”
A contributor to that analysis was Dr. Janne Gaub of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who has also studied citizen and officer perceptions and use of force complaints in Tempe, AZ and Spokane, WA.
Gaub noted that at first the “line-level officers were very skeptical of how the camera footage was going to be used by their superiors in terms of are they just going to go on a fishing expedition, trying to find things we’re doing wrong?”
That fear has largely vanished, she said
”As long as there’s not a significant cultural clash there, where they just are very, very skeptical of each other, then officers eventually come around to viewing them as a positive,” Gaub said.
Further research showed the local department’s culture “really makes a huge difference in body cameras’ impact, ranging from the decision to implement, how it’s implemented, the outcomes that departments will experience,” she said, adding that “we saw this a lot with use of force, where some departments saw dramatic declines and use of force, some moderate declines in use support, and some saw no statistically significant difference.”
The National Institute of Justice believes even more research is needed to determine the value of the cameras and the most effective use when deployed. NIJ suggests that in moving forward it would be best “to build in rigorous evaluations as law enforcement agencies expand their use of this technology.”
The latest federal data available shows about 95% of major U.S. police agencies with 500 officers and more have adopted a body-worn camera system. The biggest suppliers of cameras and cloud storage are Axon (formerly Taser International), Motorola and Panasonic. Axon is the hands-down favorite in the San Diego region.
It’s not the cameras themselves but what the cameras yield that is the biggest money maker for the suppliers. This cost is a major issue that initially few in and out of law enforcement considered. Early in the development of the body cameras some police agencies dropped out because of the storage costs.
In time this led to the creation of large, secure cloud storage systems that police agencies use, not only for storage but for sharing their videos with prosecutors and defense attorneys. Initially the storage across the country was free but the industry moved to “monetize their interaction” with law enforcement. For the manufacturers of the camera systems, the storage of the information is their bread and butter, not the cameras, which can cost about $1,000 each.
“Everything that’s recorded on that camera, it has to be treated as evidence,” said University of Arizona professor of criminology Mike White. “So it has to be treated like any other piece of evidence, which means it has to be stored, it has to be stored securely, and then for how long is it going to be stored?”
There is a common misconception about camera use, said former San Diego prosecutor Damon Mosler.
“They weren’t designed to necessarily collect viable evidence,” said Mosler, who is regarded as an expert in their use. That’s because the video captures the scene after the crime has occurred and before an arrest is made. The reality, he said, is “most policing is reactive not proactive.”
Mosler’s perspective is as a deputy district attorney for almost 30 years in San Diego County, where he ended his career by coordinating the development of policies for the cameras’ use in San Diego. Now he consults for all levels of government.
“I would say the public’s perception was that we’re going to see a lot of misconduct on these videos,” he said, adding that has largely not been the case.
White attributed this to “unrealistic expectations” around the arrival of cameras.
“Some people really expected that they were going to be the silver bullet that was going to solve, you know, a century of tension between police and minority communities, that this was going to be it and this was going to be the magic, the magic beans that are going to fix everything,” said White, who in addition to his teaching is also co-director of training and technical assistance for the Department of Justice Body-Worn Camera Policy Program.
The amount of video captured by BWC systems has grown exponentially, said Mosler. There’s not just the video shot by the police officer first on scene but all the other videos shot by arriving units. Then there is security video captured by street cameras and retailers’ security cameras, as well as cellphone video from citizens shooting police actions. Except for the city of New Orleans, no police agency reviews all the videos coming into the system.
Mosler explained that before the cameras, a police misdemeanor case would begin with a written report of 5 or 10 pages, possibly accompanied by some photos associated with it. But now, the written reports remain but accompanied by several hours of video.
More serious cases entail even more video and documentation.
It’s a “vast tsunami of digital evidence,” said Mosler. “There’s a lot of time involved but is it all relevant or useful?”
For example, since 2014, with the inception of the San Diego Police program with Axon cameras, officers have recorded over six million videos according to police records.
California law stipulates that all video for “non-evidentiary incidents” should be stored for 60 days. In situations where force is used, an arrest is made or a complaint filed against an officer or agency, the requirement is two years.
By the time the Oceanside Police Department adopted its current camera system in 2020, the City Council noted in its funding of the program that they didn’t have to buy the system but it has become “an expectation of the community” and is considered a “best practice” for law enforcement.
The agency signed a five-year agreement with Axon. Oceanside paid $1.8 million for 253 cameras, plus costs for storing the video
In comparison San Diego Police just signed off on a new five-year agreement with the city for $12 million for 1,950 cameras.
Contracts reviewed for this article don’t break down the costs for cameras and storage separately; both are sold as a package deal.
Escondido’s Miller said the Axon system “meets all the requirements for secure evidence through the California Justice Information System. It’s all cloud-based. It’s redundant. The system is password protected, and then it’s got multi-factor authentication.”
“Whether it’s a photograph, a video or any other digital evidence,” he said, “we can see exactly who created it, when it was uploaded, who accessed it, who played it, who it was shared with, right. And then it also prohibits or doesn’t allow an officer to manipulate the video; it can’t be deleted off their camera.”
Escondido has 297 cameras now for 148 sworn officers. This includes patrol, traffic and gang enforcement, who get two cameras, as the agency’s officers take their cars home and “we want them armed with a camera at all times,” said Miller. They also provide cameras for patrol technicians and officers who transport prisoners.
Controversy over the use of the artificial intelligence system Truleo to review all police recordings is the next big thing in the debate over body-worn cameras.
All audio from all officers go into the Truleo system daily for analysis and automatic transcription highlighting both bad and good interactions.
“We invested a lot of money in body cameras to improve accountability, and Truleo helps us earn a higher return on that investment for our community,” said one user, Anaheim Police Chief Jorge Cisneros.
There appears to be no public interest locally in the system but that may change. Experts we spoke with say Truleo or other AI systems may be slow to gain traction but just like cameras, the interest in the upside might force the acceptance of the new technology.
We asked the San Diego Police Officers Association for their impression of Truleo, union President Jared Wilson said, “While there are many technologies that can assist first responders in their goal of protecting the community, some of these are simply gimmicky products that divert funds away from providing core services. There is no technology that can replace hiring well qualified officers and field supervisors.”