Will police body cameras be a mandatory subject of bargaining in Florida?

• Author: Lippman, Gary E.

If you're reading this only for a quick answer to the question in the title, I'll spare your hand the Evelyn Wood speed-read. The answer to the question is: "Yes." For those with the time and inclination to stay with this, I offer an explanation for my confidence in the answer. Whether police body cameras will improve policing in Florida is a subject for another day.

Conversations about law enforcement in the nation always have been heated. Outside "the thin blue line," those conversations are getting exponentially hotter with each officer-involved shooting, while conversations within the law enforcement community are well along to roiling about the targeting of police officers for assassination. Amid clamor more akin to dueling monologues than to conversations between the parties arrayed on either side of the yellow tape, the growing hue and cry for cameras to be affixed onto the bodies of police officers threatens to further cement various "stakeholders" into fixed positions at their bastions. It already may be too late for reasoned discussions about the cameras even within the close and closed law enforcement community. As a consumer of law enforcement services myself, I hope it isn't.

Before wading into these turbid currents, let's begin with the obvious. We all should be able to agree that the purpose of affixing cameras onto the bodies of police officers is to record their citizen contacts; specifically, police officers' uses of force upon citizens, and more specifically their uses of deadly force. While the sounds and images captured by the cameras certainly offer insight into policing for training purposes and document incidents for suspects' criminal prosecutions, the men and women to whose bodies the cameras actually are attached know well that the demand to record their every citizen contact is to assess their job performance and, toward that end, to provide evidence for their discipline and criminal prosecutions.

If you would have no problem going about your own workday with the additional duty to record each and every human interaction and to record a long list of tasks you perform routinely and without much deliberation, and you wouldn't be concerned about the prospects of those recordings being collected, critiqued, cataloged, and archived as public records perhaps into perpetuity, and you'd accept these additional responsibilities as essential functions of your continued employment without any additional compensation, I don't believe you. There's nothing going on here of any interest to you; you can move along.

For those of you still on-scene, let's do a quick briefing of where we are right now regarding what are referred to as police "body-worn cameras." For reasons that may become apparent as we continue, I prefer to refer to the devices as "body cameras."

Even before "body cameras" were introduced into the lexicon, the ubiquitous cell phone videos, patrol car "dash-cams," business properties' and elevator security cameras, and GoPro images that are standard fare in the news and online had made mundane what was remarkable, if not revelatory, in the Rodney King case. Body camera technology is affordable now, quickly is becoming more so, and with federal monies available to assist agencies' purchases, the issue no longer is whether to affix the cameras to police officers, but how quickly can it be done to as many as possible in a manner that is most effective. Yet, the narrowed fixing of the focus thus far on how the cameras can be made most "effective" clumsily has been ensuring some resistance from the men and women to whom the cameras will be affixed, i.e., the conversations about the cameras may be ensuring they will not be as effective as we need them to be.

Taking the field first for the federal government in the effort to establish the place in law enforcement for police body cameras was a report published through a cooperative agreement between the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Community Oriented Policing (COPS) and the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a private police management think-tank of sorts. The report, "Implementing a Body-Worn Camera Program: Recommendations and Lessons Learned," reduced to writing the thoughts and ideas culled from a conference in Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2013. The sole purpose of the gathering was "to discuss the policy and operational issues surrounding body-worn cameras," and, toward that end, 127 law enforcement agencies and dozens of other organizations and interests convened. The most significant of the "lessons learned" was to be found in the report's Appendix B, which contained the list of the conference's attendees.

The lesson was that unions representing police officers are failing to pay attention to this important development for their members. The list of attendees shows that law enforcement agencies throughout the United States had representatives in attendance, from Albuquerque to Yakima. There were 200 police chiefs listed to be present. Various federal agencies you would expect to appear were there, as were representatives from some universities, corporations, and management-side labor law firms. Even the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was represented. Close examination of the list confirmed that only one representative for a police officer union bothered to attend. Just one police union of all the police unions purporting to represent law enforcement recognized the importance of attending a conference specifically designed to engender a discussion among key stakeholders about the development of policies and implementation plans surrounding the placement of cameras onto the bodies of police officers. It was, thus, little surprise to discover that within the approximately 80-page report, "officer concerns" were summarily addressed in fewer than two-and-a-half pages of the report.

It may be that the lone "union guy" may have stepped out of the room when attendees brainstormed identifying sources of input law enforcement agencies might explore to hear their own "officer concerns" about the cameras they intend to affix to their officers' bodies. This suspicion arises since the universe of "useful" sources for input regarding attaching cameras to the bodies of police officers, which were identified by the conference attendees, included:

* Patrol commanders and officers

* Investigators and training supervisors

* The agency's legal department

* Communications staff

* Internal affairs personnel and evidence management personnel

* Others across the agency who will be involved with body-worn cameras

Markedly absent from the list was duly state-certified collective bargaining representatives for police officers' wages, hours, and terms and conditions of employment. This stakeholder group got...