Police cameras are failing as an accountability tool

An audit has found that Victorian police officers didn’t turn on their body worn cameras in 15 per cent of the incidents there were meant to.

Police body worn cameras in Victoria have been branded a “failure” in terms of accountability after revelations they are regularly not activated in incidents where they should be.

Body worn cameras were introduced for police in Victoria 2018, with the purpose of taking evidence from people experiencing family violence, assisting in police prosecutions and improving accountability to the general public.

According to the guidelines, these cameras must be turned on by a police officer when they are exercising legislated or common law powers, including an arrest, vehicle intercept, property search or issuing of an infringement notice, or to capture an incident occurring, likely to occur or which has occurred, such as an approach to a member of the public.

Undermining integrity and accountability

The Victorian Auditor-General this month tabled a report on body worn cameras. In a month of monitoring and testing, it found that police officers activated their cameras in 83.6 per cent of the instances they were obligated to.

A separate section of the report found that out of 33 investigations of complaints of assault by police officers at the start of last year, in nine of these instances the cameras were not turned on, equating to more than 25 per cent.

This risks “undermining a police force’s integrity and accountability to the public”, the Auditor-General found.

“This may impact the intended benefits of BWCs, which include improved public safety,” the Auditor-General said in the report.

Police Accountability Project principal solicitor Gregor Husper says he is not surprised by the report, and that he regularly sees clients involved in police incidents where footage was not captured.

“The experience we have with people who come in with incidents where they’ve been assaulted by police is quite commonly they don’t have their body worn camera turned on,” Husper says.

“For us it seems police are deliberately not using cameras in incidents where there might be use of force. In that sense the use of body worn cameras has failed to be the accountability measure that was promised - a lot was made of them as an accountability tool, but it’s been a complete failure.”

Culture of impunity

The report also found that Victoria Police does not have a way to consistently track all police officers’ use of the cameras and doesn’t know how compliant officers are with activating them when they are supposed to.

Out of the eight recommendations, Victoria Police rejected the concept of establishing a policy for regularly and consistently reviewing audit logs to reduce the risk of mishandling body worn camera footage, and to develop monitoring and reporting processes allowing for the measurement of the use of footage in legal proceedings and complaints against police.

Monitoring of police cameras is “virtually non-existent” in Australia compared with other countries such as the UK, Husper says.

“This just continues the culture of impunity that police enjoy,” he says. “They know that if they don’t turn it on, no-one will pick it up, there’ll be no blowback, it’s not monitored and they’ll get away with it.”

There are also significant issues with members of the public accessing footage from police cameras.

“You have to go to the police station to watch it and using that footage in any way other than as part of that complaints process remains illegal,” Husper says.

“For example, our criminal law team gets body worn camera footage as part of a brief of evidence in police charges, and police have to provide it. But if my criminal defence team had that footage, I’d be breaking the law if I was to look at it for any purpose other than the criminal defence lawsuit.

“It’s been a complete failure as an accountability measure because members of the public have no right to see the footage. In the main it’s illegal to see the footage, you can’t access this footage. It’s so far removed from being a tool of accountability.”

Husper called for the footage to be better available to people making complaints, more monitoring of its usage and transparency around its lack of usages in instances it should be.