Acting Sgt. Andy Paynter shows town council his new body-worn camera

RCMP Acting Sergeant Andy Paynter told Tantramar councillors on Monday that for the past two weeks, they may have noticed that most members of the Sackville detachment now have a small plastic case attached to the front of their vests.

“We’re being issued our body-worn cameras,” he said indicating that officers are being trained on how to use them.

The Sackville detachment is among the latest in New Brunswick and across Canada to receive the body-worn cameras that can record both audio and video when officers are responding to calls for service.

The camera rollout began last fall when the RCMP’s New Brunswick division issued a news release calling body-worn cameras “an independent, unbiased, and objective way to capture interactions between the community and police officers, with the goal of increasing trust between police and the communities we serve.”

The news release quoted communications officer Hans Ouellette as saying that the RCMP welcomes body-worn cameras:

“We live and work in a fast-paced, modernized environment, and the addition of this investigative tool is another positive step forward in showing our commitment to accountability and transparency.”

Front-line RCMP officers are supposed to turn on their cameras before they arrive at a service call or when they engage with members of the public.

Flashing red lights on the camera signal that it is recording.

RCMP background info

Material from RCMP background document: https://rcmp.ca/en/body-worn-cameras

Expert questions claims

Brandon University Sociology Professor Christopher Schneider. Photo submitted

Brandon University Sociology Professor Christopher Schneider, who is co-author of a forthcoming book on the police use of body-worn cameras (BWCs),  says scientific studies have produced mixed results on whether the devices reduce police use of force or the number of civilian complaints against police.

“In some circumstances, with the presence of body-worn cameras, police force goes down, as do civilian complaints, which of course is what we all like to see,” Schneider told Warktimes during a telephone interview on Wednesday.

“In other circumstances, however, there’s been evidence that has shown police use of force has increased and in many circumstances, there is no statistical or discernible difference between officers with body-worn cameras and those without,” he said.

“All of this suggests that the scientific research literature on the efficacy of body-worn cameras is mixed and inconclusive.”

As a result, Schneider says, police administrators, politicians and advocacy groups who favour BWCs, use the terms “transparency” and “accountability” to suggest that police misconduct or brutality will be exposed by the cameras and offending officers held to account for their bad behaviour.

“When we talk about accountability and transparency, it is the police that control the footage. They determine when the cameras are turned on and turned off,” he notes.

“All of which raises some serious questions about accountability and transparency when the very organization that the public is supposed to be holding to account controls the very thing that is supposed to be holding it to account.”

Schneider adds that under federal privacy legislation, BWC footage is rarely made public in Canada.

“Therefore, there is essentially no transparency in Canada around body-worn camera footage, which is really interesting I think because police know this.”

Schneider referred to an internal audit of BWCs by the Toronto Police Service in 2023.

“The Toronto police found that their own officers in use-of-force incidents did not turn on the cameras intentionally, intentionally obscured the lens of the camera and intentionally blocked the audio.”

He said officers who are found to have done these things should be fired immediately, but rarely are.

“Instead, it’s a disciplinary issue. Maybe they get docked a day’s pay, maybe a reprimand, but there’s no real disciplinary mechanisms around such behaviour and there should be.”

Concerns about costs

An example of a modern body camera designed for police use. Source Wikipedia

Schneider says the cameras, priced from about $800 to $1,500, are relatively expensive, but the main costs are the data storage and management provided by Axon, the U.S. company that is gaining a near monopoly on the use of BWCs by police forces around the world.

“In large jurisdictions, large municipalities, this can cost upwards of millions of dollars a year just to house the data on secure, cloud storage,” he says, adding that Axon is building a digital media eco-system that bundles its cameras with data storage on its proprietary evidence.com service.

“The RCMP, the Vancouver Police Department, Edmonton Police, Toronto Police, and so on, they’ve all bought in to this media ecosystem that Axon has provided,” he says.

But he wonders what would happen if Axon raises its prices and the RCMP, for example, decides it’s too expensive and wants to pull out.

“Now they have all these Axon cameras and the proprietary evidence.com cloud storage service that has all their data and all their evidence, but it’s proprietary, right?

“Axon has it and it does not transfer to a new service, like Motorola, because Motorola body-worn cameras are not going to speak to the Axon media ecosystem.”

Schneider predicts police forces will get trapped into staying with an expensive, monopolistic system.

“When police are using taxpayer money to pay for their body-worn camera provider, I think the public should be consulted. The police should go back to the public, have a public forum and say, these are all the rates we’ve been provided with. What do you guys think?

“We should be consulted because we’re paying for it.”

For earlier CBC coverage, click here.

For additional information from and about Professor Schneider, click here and here.