EDITORIAL: Police body cameras: Who should control the footage?

After an odyssey of foot-dragging, body cameras are finally on their way to implementation at the Anchorage Police Department. But lest we believe that the fight for greater transparency in policing has been won, journalism nonprofit (and ADN partner) ProPublica cautions that in many places, body cameras haven’t lived up to their promise as an accountability tool because police departments withhold, edit and misrepresent footage — even in the same kinds of incidents that prompted the demand for body-worn cameras in the first place.

Anchorage police started making promises about implementing body cameras a decade ago, but — as in many places around the country — the wheels didn’t truly start turning until a string of Lower 48 citizen-captured incidents where civilians died through police use of force. Anchorage residents felt strongly enough about the matter of police accountability that they voted to tax themselves $1.8 million to purchase, implement and maintain body-worn cameras for APD officers. Even after that vote, it still took years (and the threat of legal action) for APD to actually purchase the cameras and begin rolling them out — and, as in other municipalities where the same process has played out, initial promises of transparency have been steadily undermined by revisions of the police policy on how and when (and if) footage is made public.

The statistics about how often footage is withheld after serious incidents are sobering: In New York City in 2023, according to ProPublica’s investigation, police shot 28 people — and released footage from only seven of those shootings by year’s end. More broadly, in June 2022, ProPublica found that 79 U.S. residents were killed by police in incidents captured by body-worn cameras, and 18 months later, footage had been released in only 42% of those cases.

The language in APD’s body-camera footage policy is squishy enough that the same thing could happen here, too. As written, the release of body camera footage is at the discretion of the chief of police, which — although we have faith in the department’s professionalism — is a system in which footage could easily be delayed, withheld or selectively released if the chief saw the footage as damaging or embarrassing.

There are better models available for footage disclosure — in a place that might surprise you. After Chicago police shot and killed a teenager in 2017 and the department refused to release body-camera footage, public backlash prompted the city to create an independent body outside the police department — the Civilian Office of Police Accountability — that both investigates police misconduct and handles the release of footage from shootings and other serious incidents. That’s a system Anchorage would be wise to adopt, whether in the form of a newly created entity or an existing one that safeguards the public’s rights, such as the municipal ombudsman’s office.

The Anchorage Assembly was on the right track, though not forceful enough, in urging the department to change the body-camera policy to require the automatic release of footage in police shootings and other critical incidents. Given the department’s reticence to implement the cameras in the first place, it should be clear at this point that asking for more transparency will result in no action. The Assembly has the authority to order that change, and it should use it.

The Assembly vote just to ask for the automatic public release of serious incident footage passed by the slimmest possible margin, 7-5 — a departure from the usual near-united front the group usually musters. The reason for this, according to Assembly member Zac Johnson, was that he (and presumably other members) didn’t want to send the message that they don’t trust APD. “I don’t have a reason to doubt that the chief of police will act in good faith to release footage when it is reasonable and in the public’s interest to do so,” Johnson said. “Now, if somewhere down the road, we find that they’re not acting in that manner, then I would be happy, and I would be one of the first to stand up and say, ‘Let’s make a change.’”

There’s a big problem with that logic: Under the current policy, we will only find out that the department is not acting in our best interest after someone is dead (or, at the very least, grievously harmed). We’ve been lucky to not have had more serious or frequent use-of-force issues with APD, but that luck won’t hold forever. We need a guarantee that the cameras we’re paying for will be rolling when and if the worst happens, and that the footage they capture will be made public so that we can see for ourselves that our trust in the police is well-earned.