 This segment is on body-worn videos. I am technically the moderator, although I think we're hoping to have it much more collaborative up here and be able to answer some of your questions. I'm Alex Bustamane. I'm the Inspector General for the Los Angeles Police Department. I want to take a moment to introduce, have my colleagues here introduce themselves. I think the format that we're looking at is they're going to go both give presentations of some of their studies and the findings, and then we're going to end up talking about the findings themselves and work our way through some of at least the things that we find more interesting with this from an academic sense and also from a practical sense. So we have, I think, both those vantage points on this panel. So if I could ask my colleagues to introduce themselves. Sure. So I'm Maria Panamarenko. I'm a fellow at the Policing Project at NYU Law and also an adjunct at the law school. I'm Jennifer Fratello. I'm the Policy Director for the Office of the Independent Monitor in Denver. Should we get started? Sure. Hi everyone. So I'm going to start us off, and as I think we've actually talked a little bit earlier, there's a lot of questions about implementing body-worn camera programs. One big question is what the policies around body-worn cameras should look like, and in particular, what role the public should actually play in deciding what policies should be. So what I want to talk about a bit today is a project that we did in Camden, New Jersey to try to involve the public in formulating the department's body-worn camera policy. So I'll start by just saying a word about the Policing Project and the theory behind our work, and then describe briefly what we did in Camden, and just share a few preliminary thoughts about what we've learned. So the Policing Project is working to bring very basic and in many ways familiar principles of democratic government to policing. What do we mean by that? So we believe that before police act in ways that have an effect on the public, whether it's use force or engage in surveillance, conduct searches or seizures, or in this case, adopt body-worn camera policies, that the public should know what those policies are, that the policies should be written down, and importantly, that the public should have some opportunity to weigh in on those policies before they go into effect. Now, if I was talking about anything other than policing, this would be hardly novel and certainly not at all controversial. It's just how we do things in government. So whether it's your local school board that's deciding whether to adopt a new textbook program, or whether it's the FDA deciding on a new food safety standard, executive agencies write rules and they involve the public in formulating them. But we don't do that in policing for largely historical reasons that I won't get into. But when it comes to policing, we have policies, but rarely are they public and even less often are they formulated with any degree of input from the public. Now, in this recent report, the Task Force on 21st Century Policing suggested that departments carry out precisely the sort of policy engagement that on everything from use of force to police training to bias-free policing, that police departments develop policies and they involve community members in doing so. So we think this is great, but there are some challenges in figuring out how to actually go about it. So I'll just kind of mention a few and then I'll go back to some based on what we actually learned. So first, policing policies are complicated. So there are lengthy policies, they involve a lot of both practical and legal considerations and in order to get meaningful input from the public, departments are going to need to find some sort of way to explain to the public the trade-offs involved. When it comes to policing, the communities that are most affected by policing are not always the communities that either have opportunities to participate in government or are empowered to do so, but for policing in particular, it's essential to find ways to actually get those communities involved. And lastly, doing the sort of engagement is very resource-intensive and so we need to find ways that departments as large as the NYPD or as small as a suburban or even rural agency are able to do it. So what we've been doing is the policing project is working in partnership with law enforcement agencies and communities in different departments across the country to actually develop models or a playbook of sorts for how to do the sort of engagement and to do it on a regular basis, which brings me to our work in Camden. So the police chief in Camden, Chief Scott Thompson, attended a conference at NYU a few months back and he heard about our ideas and thought that this was something that he wanted to try. And so he invited the policing project to help get community input around the department's body-worn camera policy. And in designing the feedback process, what we tried to do is basically model our process off of notice and comment rulemaking, which is how most executive agencies get feedback, but to try to tweak it in ways to get the more kind of broad-based engagement that you want to see. So what did we do? So first, as with traditional notice and comment rulemaking, we worked with the department to post the policy online and we created a portal that basically enabled organizations or individuals to submit written comments. And here we have a comment from the ACLU that they submitted fairly detailed comments in response to the department policy. At the same time, recognizing that most people are not going to want to read a 15-page department policy or necessarily know what to say in response to it, we also created a public survey, which basically asked very specific questions about certain key aspects of body-worn camera policies. So this includes questions about when cameras come on and off, whether officers need to notify people that cameras are recording, and in particular what the policies should be about public access, whether complainants get access and when the public actually gets to see the footage. And in designing the process, we also, as you can see up there, provided for additional comments, and we actually got about a third of respondents who explained their answers or provided additional feedback, which was hugely helpful. We also held two public meetings, and the idea there was to give people an opportunity to ask questions, to share their feedback directly. This was our second of the two forums, our much better attended one. And then finally, we talked to officers who are both stakeholders in this process and who have incredibly valuable feedback about how a policy actually works in the field. So we held a couple focus groups with officers who had been using the policies during a pilot phase and asked them how things had been working out. So once we went through this process, we then prepared a fairly detailed report for the chief, basically summarizing all of the feedback that we received along all of the different policy areas. The chief has looked at the feedback, he's considered it and has indicated to us that he's actually gonna change his policy in some pretty meaningful ways. And now we are in the process of basically preparing a report on behalf of the department explaining what changes the department made in response to comments and in which comments it decided to proceed otherwise and to explain why. And I just wanna emphasize that this last part, which often is the part that doesn't happen, is actually the most important. And in administrative law, it's thought to be crucial to notice and comment rulemaking. It's how we know that an agency actually considered the feedback that it got and it forces agencies to give some sort of principled, rational explanation for why they decided to go a different way. So just, you know, people have asked what kind of feedback we got. We got basically several main categories of input. So people generally favored recording all police encounters or a larger sheriff police encounters, though people were not uniformly in favor of kind of always on policies, which tended to be the feedback we got from civil liberties groups. People also wanted to know generally when cameras were recording. People thought that the subject of the video should get access and people definitely were wondering whether there would be any provision for eventual release of footage, at least for incidents of public concern. So what did we learn from this process? So we learned a few things. So first, the sort of engagement is incredibly complicated and very time consuming. So it's hard to get people to engage. It's hard to get people out there. We went out of our way to reach out directly to community groups. We contacted about a hundred community leaders and groups in the Camden area to get people to participate. And that actually, our second forum was reasonably well attended. We had about 60 people, which for a community the size of Camden is pretty impressive. At the same time, despite the fact that it's a lengthy process, it can be hugely, hugely valuable. So everyone is talking these days about the need for greater engagement. The great thing about engagement around policy is it actually gives people something to talk about. So instead of showing up at a police community meeting and airing generalized grievances, people have something concrete to discuss and they can feel like they're working towards something constructive. And people actually really like to be asked. So at the forum, second forum in particular, we got some very pointed feedback to the department, but the one thing that was kind of uniformly held was that people were glad that the department was doing this, that it was taking public input into account and that it was really taking seriously the views of its community. And finally, people had really great ideas. So I don't wanna speak for the chief, but I actually think the policy is changing in a few not dramatic, but substantial ways that will actually make it a better policy and one that the public will be quite a bit happier with. And the final point I just wanna make, which I started with is that the sort of engagement can be very resource intensive. So one thing that I was hoping to ask my co-panelists is whether oversight agencies like Inspector General's offices, like civilian group view boards could actually help facilitate the sort of process because they often tend to be a little bit better staffed to do the sort of work than maybe the departments themselves. That's it.