There is no clear picture whether the Huntington (West Virginia) Police Department can, or even should, invest in body-worn cameras for its officers as circumstances now stand, Chief Joe Ciccarelli said.

The potential cost – in purchase, maintenance and storage – could potentially drain hundreds of thousands of dollars from the department, Ciccarelli said, with the do’s and don’t’s still shrouded in a legal gray area.

“In concept, it’s a great idea. Dash cam videos have proved to be very valuable, and I think body cams would be, too,” Ciccarelli said. “But it would be a horrendous move to make that expenditure only to find out we can’t use them, or we’re limited, or there’s no solid legal and policy framework to operate under.”

The initial purchase and outlay would cost the department approximately $100,000, Ciccarelli said, which would include the cameras themselves, hard storage for footage and operating software. Managing the cameras and footage would require that the HPD hire at a minimum an additional IT person and likely an additional clerical position, which Ciccarelli said would likely exceed $50,000 annually.

“It’s a huge expenditure to do it the right way,” Ciccarelli said, adding that a hasty decision is not in the department’s best interest. “It would be foolhardy to purchase that equipment and not have the money to maintain it. It would be worse than not having it.”

Two years ago, the debate whether police departments and the public could benefit if officers wore body cameras was near a peak in the wake of several instances of police use of force that caused public protests in several cities. At the time, Ciccarelli said the Huntington department was studying the pros and cons, and he acknowledged that body cameras might be “the next logical step” in law enforcement technology.

But then, as he does now, he raised concerns about funding, policy, and legal issues.

The right way
Ciccarelli said the department’s options on body cameras would remain open until it could be done “the right way,” and that rushing into a new system would be a costly mistake if it ultimately did not fit for the department. Comparisons were drawn to the 1980s debate of VHS or Betamax, and Ciccarelli noted the department did not want to be stuck with a Betamax, metaphorically speaking.

Another lesson from years prior, HPD’s then-newly bought car camera system proved ultimately unusable, Ciccarelli said, and the department cannot afford to fall into a money pit as deep as body cameras could potentially be.

Huntington police’s approved budget for 2016 is $12,554,076, per the city’s annual public reports. While grant money has been available, Ciccarelli said, many require a huge fund matching prerequisite, and one-time awards would do nothing to fund maintaining the footage indefinitely.

HPD received an anonymous $100,000 donation earlier this month, which was used to purchase two new police cruisers. Ciccarelli said the donation was specifically earmarked by the donor for the vehicles.

Ideally, HPD’s body cameras would be able to integrate with the department’s existing dash camera system, Ciccarelli said. The department had tried a body camera manufactured by WatchGuard, which makes their dash cams, but found the first model, which clips on the front of the shirt, too bulky. Ciccarelli said the company has recently tested a smaller model, one that fits in the shirt pocket, that would be more mobile and less likely to fall off in a struggle.

Legal gray areas
Even if a perfect model existed and HPD’s funding never ran dry, a laundry list of legal and policy questions remain. Even as departments across the country move toward deploying body cams, Ciccarelli said there’s little to no legal structure anywhere, and it could end up costing police more than they bargained for.

“The law is not well-founded on any of this,” Ciccarelli said. “So to go out and buy this equipment and then tomorrow the legislature or a court says you have to keep (footage) forever, then you’re sunk in a morass that you can’t get out of because you don’t have the funding to pay for all that storage.”

There are no guidelines, either at the department or state level, dictating when or how the body cameras are activated. HPD’s dash cams, for example, are triggered automatically when the officer engages the cruiser’s emergency lights.

If body cameras could somehow go on automatically in emergency situations, Ciccarelli said, it would limit human error on the officer’s part and make it one less protocol to worry about during an encounter.

Without a trigger to limit when the camera comes on, police are poised to be stuck with far more video footage than would simply be generated through dash cams. How long that footage should be kept is yet to be legally defined, but if a ruling were to state body cam footage be kept forever as evidence, departments would have to ever expand their often expensive hard data storage to keep up with the mountains of footage.

“We’ll continue to look at the technology, but the policy and the legal aspects have got to be firmly resolved before I think we would make that decision,” Ciccarelli said.

Privacy and public access
Often championed in the public as a cure-all to police misconduct, body cameras themselves have the potential to violate a person’s rights and privacy, said Wendy Perkins, Marshall University assistant professor of criminal justice.

“People clamoring for body cameras aren’t necessarily considering the civil liberty violations that come with the cameras and whether or not it’s even legal for police to go into someone’s home wearing a body camera,” Perkins said.

There’s also the question of whether body cam footage would be available to the public through a Freedom of Information Act request. As it stands, dash cam footage can be accessed via FOIA request, though there is the automatic discretion of dash cams only activated when the emergency lights come on.

Immediately making footage available to FOIA, Perkins said, could potentially taint a jury pool and jeopardize a pending investigation.

“I can understand police departments wanting to be transparent,” Perkins said. “But they also have to be careful about making sure the case has integrity, regardless of what it is.”

Although FOIA provides the public access to government documents, Ciccarelli said leaving dash cam videos open to FOIA could create the potential for abuse. He cited the footage of a December 2014 traffic stop in which now-West Virginia gubernatorial candidate Jim Justice began arguing a speeding ticket with a Lewisburg police officer. That footage, made available through FOIA, was used in negative ads against Justice during his campaign.

“Ultimately at the end of the day, it’s evidence,” Ciccarelli said. “It’s not for entertainment on the 6 o’clock news or to smear somebody in a political campaign.”

No guidelines exist for exempting body cam footage from FOIA requests, and Ciccarelli said he would like to see it treated as evidence, at the discretion of prosecutors to release, which would prevent random access from the public.

“There is a tremendous potential for abuse far beyond the law enforcement use of these things,” Ciccarelli said.

Worth the cost?
According to its latest internal annual report, Huntington police received just 10 public complaints against officers in 2014, none of which were sustained. Perkins, while stating HPD’s apparent good behavior does not make them above oversight, questioned whether body cams would make enough of a difference in police accountability to outweigh the cost.

“If you want to reduce the amount of complaints by getting cameras – there’s only 10 complaints,” Perkins said. “Is that worth the cost of outfitting every road officer or detective with a camera?”

In 2014, HPD’s annual report stated officers used force 142 times, the majority of which were hand-to-hand, and just one with a firearm. Huntington police’s last officer-involved shooting was on July 26, 2014, when an HPD officer shot an armed man inside the El Ranchito Mexican restaurant.

Ciccarelli said officers are so surrounded by video surveillance anyway, the police mindset is to always assume they’re being recorded.

Other agencies similar in size and demographic have already made the jump to body cameras, notably the Charleston Police Department. Ciccarelli said all agencies are at least looking at the body camera option, but proceeding with caution.

Different departments have different budgets, needs and leadership, and Perkins noted what’s right for one department may not be for another.

“My impression is that HPD is trying to take a critical look at whether or not they need the cameras, first of all,” Perkins said. “Second, how are they going to be able to use them given the legal restrictions? Third, say they decide they need the cameras. How are they going to pay for them, the storage and the IT people to take care of them?”