Ferguson and cop cams: useful tool or trojan horse?

Some privacy experts say that while body-worn cameras on police officers offer the promise of accountability, without the right checks in place, they could end up curbing citizens' civil liberties.

In the wake of a grand jury's decision not to indict the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, the teen's parents are calling for a law in his name that would require police officers across the U.S. to wear video cameras. They say the move could prevent similar deaths at the hands of police.

But some, including Alberta's Information and Privacy commissioner Jill Clayton, want to ensure body-worn cameras on cops don't come at the expense of the public's privacy. Adam Molnar, a Canadian criminologist who specializes in law enforcement technology at Deakin University in Australia, shares her concerns.

"Even though there are gains about introducing accountability into spaces, there's a whole range of privacy issues that come into play. One of them, is are police able to edit on the fly? Which encounters to police choose to record? There's a whole set of rules and norms that should be in place about when the police should turn the cameras on and off and whether they should even have the control of turning them on and off at will," says Molnar.

Canadian cities including Toronto, Montreal and Edmonton are considering putting cameras on front-line police officers. Calgary's police force has been testing out body-worn cameras and plans to put them on its officers as early as next month.

"The officers are saying, 'you know what we don't have anything to hide'. So this is an opportunity for the officers to say 'I am professional. I do use my training, I do utilize my ethics'," says Superintendent Kevan Stuart, who leads the body-worn camera initiative for the Calgary Police Service.

Stuart says officers will have the ability to turn the cameras on and off. He says officers will be expected to turn them on during interactions with citizens or other members of the public.

He says if an officer turns the camera off, he or she will have to provide a justification. So far, Stuart says testing out the cameras has been successful.

"What we noticed were the officers that wore the cameras, there weren't any complaints against those officers from the public. But the camera's very visible, the citizens can see that the camera is there and that it's on and so there's nothing covert or hidden about it," says Stuart.

Keeping cop cams in check

Stuart says the Calgary Police Service will abide by the province's privacy laws in rolling out body-worn cameras and in storing the data they capture.  He says captured data will be kept for 13 months, and destroyed if it's not needed for future court cases.

"So for example, I'm a police officer doing a street interview with you out on the street and people are walking by. So if you want that video, which you can get under FOIP - Freedom of Information - then all those people that are in that camera view, they all have to be blocked out," says Stuart.

Starting next year, Toronto's police force will launch a body-worn camera pilot project on officers in four areas of the city.

"We've had cameras in police stations, we have cameras in police cars and this is a logical extension. They provide the best possible evidence of what happened and they've been very effective in screening out spurious and malicious complaints," says Mark Pugash, spokesperson for the Toronto Police Service. 

Pugash says privacy issues are front and centre in testing out the technology.

"The reason we want a year-long pilot is to make sure we test various sorts of equipment and that we have the time to consult with privacy people and human rights organization to make sure that we get it all right," says Pugash.

But criminologist Adam Molnar wants to see better guidelines around how long police can hold onto the video they record.

"The concern here is that potentially, the officers could review the data -- say if they wanted to look for an informant or potentially a whistleblower -- and they could actually go post hoc, after the fact, and scrutinize that data and look for a minor infraction and potentially use that minor infraction as a means to incriminate or smear the reputation of a particular individual," says Molnar.

Molnar says facial recognition technology used in conjunction with body-worn cameras presents even more challenges to civil liberties. He says that's not happening in any Canadian jurisdictions right now, but it could happen down the road.

"There are a large number of exchanges that involve innocent people that will be collected. One great example is if we're at a political demonstration and you have an officer that's wearing one [a body-worn camera] and they're able to record the personal information of a large number of individuals at this demonstration. It's then possible to either integrate that footage with images that might have been collected over the internet through social media," says Molnar.

Molnar says key questions around the use of these cameras still need answers.

"We need to ask some questions about ways the technology could be misused against whistleblowers or informants or activists. And I would love to see privacy by design - building in privacy into the database architecture, so that any time anyone accesses video records, that access is recorded with immutable audit logs that keep track of whether the data has been accessed, whether it's been tampered with, and to make sure that we have data retention and destruction schedules that are upheld," says Molnar.