Police Body-Worn Cameras

Originally posted in the August 17th Edition of the CivicLex Weekly.

On Tuesday, the Planning & Public Safety Committee will hear a presentation from the Lexington Division of Police on the use of Body-Work Cameras (BWC). Even before the killing of George Floyd, the topic of the use of Body-Worn cameras has come under increased scrutiny in conversations around police accountability. 

This Tuesday's presentation will give an overview of Lexington's program, in place since 2016, which has placed 800 cameras on officers throughout the Division of Police. 

Here are some things we've learned about the program in advance of the presentation:

• The contract for the city's BWCs is with Axon, and is in its last year. 

• The total financial investment for the program from the city since 2016 is around $2,935,059.00.

• The city started tracking the failure rate of their BWC in 2017, and since then, there have been 874 instances of failure.

• Increasingly, the proportion of BWC failures has been the fault of officers themselves, not the equipment. In 2018, 26% of failures were the result of officers. In 2020 to date, that rate has almost doubled to 46%. 

• At the same time, the equipment itself has failed less. In 2018, 38% of failures were the result of BWC equipment. In 2020 to date, that failure rate is down to 20%.

• Device activation failures are quite rare - less than 0.1%. Between January 2018 and July 2020, there were only 851 failures to activate out of 850,000+ total activations.

• There is disciplinary action for officers who fail to activate their BWC. For the first offense, they receive a written reprimand. For their third, they can receive a 3-day suspension.