The use of body-worn cameras (BWC) has the potential to aid police reform, but the NYPD’s BWC program shows that turning the cameras on is not enough. More than 6 years after this program began, gaining access to footage continues to be an obstacle for civilians bringing claims against the police.
The NYPD began its rollout of BWCs in 2017. The NYPD reports that over 24,000 of its members are equipped with a BWC, including “all Police Officers, Detectives, Sergeants and Lieutenants regularly assigned to perform patrol duties throughout the city.”
The New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), an independent agency empowered to investigate "complaints against New York City police officers alleging the use of excessive or unnecessary force, abuse of authority, discourtesy, or the use of offensive language,” uses BWC footage to resolve complaints against officers.
However, the CCRB has had long-standing issues obtaining BWC footage from the NYPD.
A Slow Start, Plagued with Delays and “False Negatives”
In 2018, the review board reported increasing delays in the time it took to receive BWC footage from the NYPD, noting that in Q4, “it took an average of 20 business days to receive a response to a BWC footage request, regardless of whether the response included footage.” For footage requests made by June 30, 2019 and closed by July 31, “that number jumped to an average of 42 business days for the CCRB to receive BWC footage, and 37 business days for the NYPD to tell the CCRB that no footage existed or that the request for footage was denied.”
Additionally, the board highlighted the issue of “false negatives,” in which requests for BWC footage were given a negative response, but footage was later found. The CCRB identified instances of false negatives in almost 19% of BWC requests.
CCRB investigators “often learned about false negatives, and the subsequent existence of BWC footage, haphazardly—from reading about BWC assignments in police documents, during officer interviews, and, in at least two instances, via video footage provided to the news media.”
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Possible explanations for false negatives were listed as “BWC requests providing limited or incomplete information, the completeness of search criteria used by the NYPD to identify BWC footage, or human error.”
Recommending location tracking or geotagging as a potential way to “reduce false negatives and expedite BWC searches,” the review board reported that “despite Axon’s software capabilities, the NYPD currently does not use geotagging technology. It instead relies on human input, making it difficult to identify incident locations as well as the location of officers during an incident.”
In November of 2019, in response to these problems, the CCRB and NYPD signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), by which the two parties agreed to the establishment of a facility in which CCRB employees can oversee NYPD employees as they conduct database searches for BWC footage requested by the CCRB.
Unfortunately, this MOU was largely ignored. In 2021, The City of New York Department of Investigation (DOI) reported that full implementation of the MOU was “stymied by budgetary constraints in New York City resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.”
It also noted that “sealed records laws are a legitimate legal impediment to further improving CCRB’s BWC footage access, given the current structure of NYPD’s BWC footage platform,” which “commingles sealed records with unsealed records, thereby preventing direct access by CCRB."
The DOI added that “Without a solution to the sealed records issue, the MOU cannot be substantially improved upon.” It also noted that the commingling of these records is against the law, stating “that if sealed records were properly sequestered within the BWC database, as required by law, this legal impediment to CCRB’s direct access would be removed.”
From our research, it seems that both the NYPD and the CCRB eventually abandoned the footage search oversight provisions set out in the 2019 agreement. We reached out to the CCRB for comment on this apparent inaction but received no response.
Without proper implementation of the MOU, delays in accessing BWC footage continued. By the third quarter of 2020, the NYPD took an average of 79 business days to respond to BWC footage requests, an increase from an average of 33 business days “over the first half of the year.”
The CCRB’s 2020 Annual Report attributed “significantly delayed” receipt of BWC footage to staffing limitations within the NYPD during the Covid-19 pandemic, but stated that it “worked with the Department to address the backlog, which was resolved by the time of publication of this report.”
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Improved Response Times, Unimproved Footage Fulfillment Rate
Data from the CCRB’s 2022 Annual Report shows that while the average turnaround time for BWC requests was 48 days in 2019 and 58 days in 2020, delays have since improved significantly.
Between January 2021 and July 2022, the average number of days to receive a positive return on BWC requests ranged from 2.8 days on the low end to 9.4 days on the high end. Between January 2022 and July 2023, the average number of days to receive positive return on BWC requests ranged from 4.1 days on the low end to 11 days on the high end.
Although this data is promising, the CCRB Executive Director’s Monthly Report on July 2023 statistics shows that a significant percentage of BWC footage requests remain unfulfilled. This is not a new problem. In December 2022, 36 BWC Footage requests, or 25.5% of the total, had been pending for 90 days or more. Little improvement has been made since then. In December 2023, 42 BWC Footage requests, or 24.3% of the total, have been pending for 90 days or more.
The CCRB is still pushing for direct access to BWC footage, instead of waiting for the NYPD to respond to their requests for footage.
At a January 2022 CCRB Public Meeting, Jonathan Darche, executive director of the CCRB, stated that “While there have been huge improvements in fulfilling requests for NYPD records, particularly body-worn camera footage, it is important that the CCRB should have direct access to the body-worn camera footage and other necessary records in order to more efficiently complete our investigations.”