Editorial | Cool heads on body-worn cameras

This newspaper is surprised at the apparent hostility with which the constabulary has responded to organisations calling for the use of body-worn cameras (BWC) when cops go on planned operations.

Although planned operations (PO) account for a minuscule proportion of the police’s interaction with the public, it is during POs that over 40 per cent of killings (230 up to September 25) by cops occur.

But not only have the police essentially told everyone to buzz off with their advice, by arguing that the force just didn’t have the BWCs to use in POs, they appear to have somehow misunderstood, and then framed as a binary choice, the decision they have been asked to make: either BWCs on planned operations or nothing at all.

Implicit in the police’s initial statement last Thursday was that the deployment of BWCs during POs will happen when 1,000 body-worn cameras, now on order, are received and commissioned.

In the meantime, everyone could just go take a hike, or talk until they were blue.

Or, as a statement on Saturday, put it: “Let it be clearly stated: the JCF (Jamaica Constabulary Force) will not be dictated to by Jamaicans for Justice (JFJ), the Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM), or any other group, on matters of operational deployment of BWCs or any internal operation strategies.”

INDECOM is the statutory body that investigates all police shootings, as well as complaints of excessive force; JFJ is a human rights group. Both organisations are concerned about a sharp upward spiral in police killings over the last three years, including a 75 per cent hike in the first nine months of 2025, compared to the same period in 2024.

LONG PRESSED

INDECOM and JFJ have long pressed for the use of body-worn cameras. They have been joined by other institutions, including, most recently, the Public Defender, the agency that helps citizens fight abuse of their rights by the State and its agencies.

While no one wishes to intrude on Police Commissioner Kevin Blake’s legislated authority over operational matters in the constabulary, all institutions, and leaders, can benefit from open discussion and debate. They should be willing to engage without hubris.

On the matter of the use of BWCs, the JCF should be ready to offer its compelling argument for holding fast to its declared course when what has been proposed by INDECOM, JFJ and others seems so obvious and unimpeachably logical.

The JCF has reported that it owns 750 BWCs. These are assigned to formations engaged in public order policing. That’s nothing to argue over.

However, the police often face questions of credibility when their encounters with citizens end in civilian deaths. Regularly there are allegations by family, friends and community members of the deceased that the killing was extrajudicial.

Unfortunately, in none of these cases do the police ever have video evidence of the incident, either because they were not fitted with BWCs, or in the few cases when they were, they didn’t know how to operate them.

This question of trust was magnified recently when a young man was shot dead at his home during a planned operation. The police said he pulled a gun on them in a bedroom.

However, video footage, apparently from surveillance cameras inside the home, has emerged on social media. It shows the young man casually walking to the front door, opening it, then putting his hands in the air in a sign of surrender, apparently on seeing police officers. He goes outside as armed police enter the house.

No further video has emerged showing what happened afterwards. Certainly none from a police body-worn camera.

SENSIBLE

It would be sensible and logistically possible, albeit requiring a bit of management, for some of the 750 existing BWCs to be made available to teams going on defined or planned operations. The effective use of BWCs would help to insulate these officers from false claims of misbehaviour.

This would not be a case, as the JCF seems to feel, of the police being “mandated to use tools that we do not yet have”. Rather, it is deploying what is available more efficiently, especially in circumstances from which controversies are most likely to flow. QED!

Neither is it useful to harangue people who raise these issues with questions of whether they wanted fewer police operations so as to lessen their encounters with criminals, or to posit as an alternative that INDECOM and the JFJ go on a campaign to tell gunmen not to shoot at the police. Nor is it contradictory for INDECOM to vindicate the majority of officers involved in killings, but also be deeply concerned by the rise in deaths.

Democracy thrives on the tensions between the institutions that keep the system on even keel. Law enforcement organisations help to ensure order as societies operate in accordance with prescribed rules.

But law enforcement bodies also have significant coercive powers, which they can overstep. Which is why there are organisations, official and non-government, that help to hold law enforcement groups accountable and promote citizens’ rights.

There is nothing perverse in supporting an institution and holding it accountable.