In the wake of the April 9 arrest in which an Apple Valley man was beaten, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department is committed to developing and implementing a program to outfit deputies with body cameras.
It will, however, take some time.
“We’re going to do it right, We’re going to make sure we have the right (data) storage systems in place,” Sheriff John McMahon said in an interview. “I don’t want to jump into something and find out a few months down the road we made the wrong decision in haste.”
Responding to the April 9 beating of Francis Pusok by sheriff’s deputies after a lengthy pursuit in Apple Valley and Hesperia, County Supervisors James Ramos and Robert Lovingood last week called on McMahon to quickly implement a body camera pilot program and bring a recommendation for consideration on a larger-scale program.
McMahon, however, has never been one to cave to pressure, and said he wants to ensure that he takes the right proposal to the Board of Supervisors when the time comes.
Use of force by police in the last year resulting in the deaths of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Missouri; New York City, and most recently, North Charleston, South Carolina, prompted a national debate over whether body cameras should be worn by police. Law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have countered that the cost to redact the videos by blurring the images of bystanders, victims and witnesses caught in the camera eye creates logistical problems outside their reach, and have proposed restricting, or outright blocking, public access to body camera videos.
The video footage of the Francis Pusok beating in Apple Valley is the latest incident fueling the ongoing debate over body cameras.
A news video of Pusok’s arrest shows deputies crowding around him, kicking and punching him while he is on the ground. In an interview, Pusok estimated he had been punched or kicked 100 times by deputies. He also said it wasn’t the first time he was abused by authorities, and that it was his fear of police based on earlier incidents that prompted him to flee from deputies in the first place.
Sheriff’s officials have declined to comment on Pusok’s allegations, noting that Pusok has already announced he plans to sue the department.
McMahon has placed 10 deputies on paid leave pending the outcomes of investigations by his office and by the FBI, which announced it would review the case to determine whether there were any civil rights violations.
The Pusok beating occurred about five months after the Journal of Quantitative Criminology published a study, “The Effect of Police Body-Worn Cameras on Use of Force and Citizens’ Complaints Against the Police: A Randomized Controlled Trial,” co-authored by Rialto Police Chief William “Tony” Farrar.
The study used Rialto’s recently implemented body camera program as the controlled setting for the experiment.
The study indicated it was the first randomized controlled trial using police body cameras, testing their effect over a one-year period. The results: The number of complaints filed against officers dropped by 90 percent, from 0.7 per 1,000 police contacts with citizens to 0.07 per 1,000 contacts.
The Sheriff’s Department has already formed a committee to gather information on its in-the-works body camera pilot program, and the group is now considering camera options. One or more body camera models will ultimately be selected during the pilot program and will be compatible with the Microsoft Azure cloud storage system, which the department uses now and is compliant with all state and federal regulations for law enforcement’s storage of confidential data, McMahon said.
“As we get information back from the pilot program, we’ll make a decision on a long-term program and bring it to the Board of Supervisors with a request for funding,” McMahon said.
The Sheriff’s Department has been considering body cameras for years. A pilot program that ran from 2009 to March 2011 tested a product called Vidmic, two other types of body cameras and the Enterprise audio recorder. The department opted for the audio recorders due to the lower cost and the fact that the video systems did not fulfill the department’s needs, sheriff’s spokeswoman Jodi Miller said.
A second pilot program ran from February 2012 through May 2013 using the Axon body camera by Taser, but the department was not satisfied due to technical limitations and continued reviewing its options.
The pilot program will run out of the sheriff’s Apple Valley and Highland stations. The long-term plan calls for body cameras in the $300-$400 price range to outfit 1,900 deputies, with a total program cost of between $570,000 and $760,000, with a recurring fee for use of a cloud-based data storage system, Miller said.
Stephen Tibbetts, a criminology professor at Cal State San Bernardino, said data presented to date shows that body cameras do in fact have a significant impact on reducing the number of citizen complaints against police. He cited Farrar’s study in Rialto as the best example.
Law enforcement officials, however, do appear to have legitimate concerns over the privacy rights of witnesses, victims and bystanders who appear in the videos, and that poses myriad issues that could very well likely thwart public access, Tibbetts said.
“In theory, I love the idea. Pragmatically, I see many issues that are going to hinder, if not prevent, them (videos) from being able to be viewed by the public,” Tibbetts said “If that’s the goal, I wouldn’t count on it happening.”