LOS ANGELES -- San Diego is among the U.S. police departments with policies calling for officers to activate body cameras before initiating contact with a civilian in most cases. But as is the case in other departments, compliance is less than perfect.
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In one instance, authorities worry that there may not be footage of a gunman opening fire on two San Diego police officers, killing one, because the surviving officer activated his camera when the wounded shooter was running away.
The result of noncompliance in such situations is the inconsistent use of an increasingly common tool meant to give investigators and an often-skeptical public a fuller picture of police actions.
"The main motive of body cameras is to provide openness and transparency and build trust in the police," said Samuel Walker, a retired criminal justice professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.
"If officers are not turning cameras on, well, you're not going to build trust," he said. "You're going to reinforce the cynicism that already exists."
He pointed to a study that showed low compliance rates of officers in one high-crime Phoenix neighborhood between April 2013 and May 2014, the most recent information available. Officers only recorded 6.5 percent of traffic stops even though the department's policy required cameras to be activated "as soon as it is safe and practical," according to the study, conducted by Arizona State University's Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety.
The biggest part of the problem, Walker said, is a lack of discipline.
Chicago; Dallas; Denver; New Orleans; New York; Oakland, Calif.; and San Diego are among the cities that don't specify penalties when officers fail to record, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's School of Law.
The American Civil Liberties Union has studied the issue and said clear policies are vital, along with punishment for failure to comply.
"Departments can't look the other way when officers fail to activate body cameras in critical incidents, or they become useless for accountability," said Peter Bibring, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California.
San Diego police have been criticized for failing to record a number of high-profile shootings. That prompted the department to revise its policy to stipulate that officers must turn on their cameras before most types of contact with civilians, though violations have continued.
Last month, the two San Diego gang-unit officers on nighttime patrol pulled up next to a pedestrian on a darkened residential street, and the man almost immediately opened fire, police said. Jesse Gomez, who faces charges in the attack, shot Wade Irwin as he got out of the patrol car and then fired through the open door and fatally wounded Irwin's partner, Jonathan De Guzman, according to police.
Irwin fired back and started manually recording after the shooting, but police haven't said what was captured.
The cameras are on before an officer hits record, and they have a recall function to retrieve video from shortly before an officer starts recording. That function allows for 30 seconds of video to be retrieved, without audio.
It's unclear whether Irwin activated that feature.
Both Irwin and Gomez were wounded and remain hospitalized.
Victor Torres, a civil-rights attorney in San Diego, said the department's policy makes it clear that both officers should have been recording before approaching the gunman.
Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman has commended Irwin's actions, including activating his body camera when he did, as heroic.
The Alameda County sheriff's office changed its body-camera policy after a highly publicized encounter in November in which two deputies were caught on surveillance video using their batons to beat a car-theft suspect in the middle of a street in San Francisco's Mission District.
Eleven officers responded, and 10 failed to turn on their body cameras. The one who did activate his did so by accident.
Three officers were placed on leave, including two who are charged with assault under color of authority.
No one was disciplined for failing to turn on their cameras because the department's policy at the time encouraged, but did not require, their use, said Sgt. Ray Kelly, an agency spokesman. The agency now requires deputies to use the cameras in most circumstances and lays out the discipline for failure to comply.
The department hasn't had a problem with compliance since, Kelly said.
A Section on 08/07/2016