ST. LOUIS — Body cameras, a political hot button at City Hall for six years, may finally become a reality in a few weeks for ӣƵ police following a vote Wednesday by a city board.
As protests continue here and across the nation over police use of force spurred by George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, the Board of Estimate and Apportionment will decide on the initial year of a five-year, $5 million deal to outfit ӣƵ officers with the cameras.
The first batch of the 800 cameras could be in use by the end of July, Mayor Lyda Krewson’s spokesman, Jacob Long, said Tuesday. Long said he didn’t know how many would be in that rollout.
“We need this to heal,” Aldermanic President Lewis Reed said earlier this month in announcing that negotiations on the contract with Georgia-based Utility Associates were moving forward.
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“We need this for people to feel more confidence in our police department, especially in the African American community.”
Reed serves on the estimate board, the city’s top fiscal body, with Krewson and Comptroller Darlene Green. All three have indicated support for cameras. Up for a vote Wednesday is a first-year allocation of $1.7 million.
Before the cameras can actually be deployed, city police management will discuss details of their use with the ӣƵ Police Officers Association, the officers’ union.
Jeff Roorda, the association’s business manager, said Tuesday that a joint union-management committee with equal representation from the two sides will meet soon to discuss the issue.
Roorda says the union’s contract with the city requires that any changes in equipment, such as the addition of body cameras, be approved by the joint committee.
Disagreeing is city government’s top lawyer, City Counselor Julian Bush. Bush said Chief John Hayden is required to consult with the committee but that Hayden has authority to make the final decision.
Asked about an end-of-July start date for body cameras, Roorda said “if we make a lot of progress very quickly, that is possible.”
Roorda said “we’re not opposed to body cameras ... we just want it to be a process where we get the most bang for our buck and we should have a voice” on policies governing their use.
In the past, the association has expressed concern about protecting officers’ due process rights in any use of body cameras.
Union officials also have complained previously that dashboard cameras in police cars have been used to discipline officers for minor violations such as not wearing a seat belt.
Meanwhile, Roorda said the association and the city are “close” to working out a new collective bargaining contract on wages and other matters.
ӣƵ officials began discussing body cameras in 2014 after the shooting of Michael Brown, a black teenager, by a white Ferguson police officer. Some ӣƵ police sergeants started using cameras on a trial basis in 2015.
The estimate board in 2017 voted to accept a free one-year trial from one body camera vendor and to seek bids for a longer-term deal. But Krewson’s administration backed out of the trial and put the issue on the back burner, citing cost concerns.
Last year, amid pressure from Reed, the mayor decided to activate the selection committee. In March, that panel chose Utility Associates from three finalists. Mary Goodman, an aide to Reed, said the overall contract eventually worked out also has money for 200 in-car cameras.
Nationwide, body cameras have been pointed to as a potential equalizer that would show the truth of encounters with officers.
Nationally, advocates and officers agree that the technology’s broad adoption has been helpful but say its value is dictated by the policies and practices around its use.
Cameras have largely failed to deliver swift accountability because the release of video is frequently long delayed or denied, said Harlan Yu, an official at the civil rights and technology nonprofit Upturn.
Call for a police registry
Also Wednesday, Comptroller Green will urge the estimate board to pass a resolution calling for developing a registry that identifies officers who have engaged in misconduct “that calls into question their ability to serve as impartial enforcers of the law.”
Green’s resolution also would call on the city to eliminate the use of deadly and excessive force against persons who are “unarmed, subdued, or otherwise possess inferior force.”
Meanwhile, Krewson, Chief Hayden and Public Safety Director Jimmie Edwards on Tuesday issued a joint statement outlining use-of-force restrictions and training already in place for city police.
Among other things, the statement noted that the city department since 2007 hasn’t taught or sanctioned any type of chokehold technique. They also said city police training since 2014 has included de-escalation tactics and implicit bias and racial equity instruction.
They also said all city officers have a duty to intervene to prevent misconduct against a citizen by another officer. And they said officers should be taught to use the least amount of force reasonably necessary to effectively bring an incident under control while protecting life.
Krewson, Hayden and Edwards also said they support creation of a national registry of “bad and corrupt” police officers, national police training standards, and the hiring of mental and behavioral health specialists to aid police.
Workhouse opposition
Advocates of closing the ӣƵ Medium Security Institution said Tuesday that 14 of the city’s 27 current members of the Board of Aldermen now support closing the facility, commonly referred as the city workhouse.
The Close the Workhouse campaign made the announcement as it continued its efforts to get city officials to delete money for the Hall Street facility as they work on a proposed city budget for the fiscal year beginning July.
The proposed budget now under review calls for workhouse spending to drop next year to $8.8 million from $16 million due to reductions in inmate counts.
Critics who want to close the workhouse say conditions there are inhumane, and that many pretrial detainees held there could be released on bail or held at the city’s newer jail downtown.
“We are at a crossroads, and the people of this city are demanding that we end our reliance on failed systems and begin investing deeply in our communities,” said Blake Strode, executive director of ArchCity Defenders, which is active in the campaign.
Krewson and Edwards say the workhouse has been improved in recent years and is still needed.
An aldermanic budget panel has asked the estimate board to consider changes on unrelated issues.
The full Board of Aldermen has yet to take up the budget, which must be passed by the end of the month. Two vacancies on the board will be filled in a special election next week.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
