Glitches have plagued Gig Harbor’s body-camera system. Here’s how it’s supposed to work
After a Gig Harbor police officer helped defuse a confrontation between restaurant staff and an unmasked customer, he checked his new body camera to see if it had worked.
It hadn’t. When the officer returned to his car to download the footage, nothing was there.
The incident in April was another in a series of glitches that have plagued the deployment of body cameras in the department. The project has been in the works for almost a year, but a frustrating series of technical problems have made it a rocky rollout.
One of these occurred in March, when officers were discovering their car batteries were dead. It turns out that a Bluetooth receiver was drawing down the batteries by continuously looking to see if the camera was active. Officers also had trouble uploading their recorded videos to internet cloud servers, and some of the camera firmware turned out to be obsolete.
Chief Kelly Busey predicted in June the cameras would be in use within 30 to 45 days. Since then, there have been so many delays he’s stopped making predictions. Nevertheless, the chief noted that 10 of the department’s 14 patrol cars are now equipped with the technology.
Inside the car
In an interview Monday, Busey walked The Gateway through a demonstration about how the body cameras are supposed to work. Leaning into an open patrol car, he pointed out the docking station and in-dash video recorders officers use.
“Once an officer obtains a body worn video, they’ll come into their patrol car and they’ll need to get the video from the body camera to the in-car DVR, the digital video recorder,” Busey said.
“They’ll do that by putting it into a docking port, snapping it in place, and waiting for the DVR to recognize the body camera. Once it does that, they’ll go to a menu on the monitor in the car and they’ll categorize that video. They’ll select if an arrest, if its a traffic stop, if its a social contact, something like that. That speaks to how long we’ll retain those videos.”
Once the footage is stored in the DVR, Busey said, the video is supposed to then upload to cloud storage when the officers pull into the station. This posed another challenge that also required additional delays.
“The primary technical aspects we had to clear up was the communication, getting the videos from the car to the cloud. We were trying to do that through the officer’s computer,” Busey said. “That simply didn’t work for a variety of reasons, so it took us a couple of months to get a [wireless] access point installed above the garage here at our police department.”
Patrol officer Jarab Daniel said department policy determines when officers will turn on the cameras.
“Anything where I’m going to make an arrest. Anything that appears to disorderly, violent, any sort of physical altercation,” Daniel said. “A bunch of different scenarios. If it’s aggressive in nature, pursuits, that kind of stuff.”
Video vanished
Daniel was the officer who responded to the April 21 restaurant call. The business owner told 911 that a customer was being disorderly and refusing to leave. A report on the incident says the customer would not wear a mask and also was carrying a firearm on his hip, though was not using it in a threatening manner.
Daniel said he found two unmasked customers in an argument with employees. At the request of the staff, the two men were issued a trespass warning, banning them from the restaurant.
Daniel was wearing a body camera that was recording during the incident. After the incident was resolved, he attempted to download the video from the camera to the server.
The footage never got there. Instead, Daniel said he encountered an error and contacted technical support. The footage was deemed unrecoverable. It turns out that a required firmware update had wiped the video.
Busey said this was a one-off incident and that the technical issue had been resolved. The camera is now back in use.
Outdated firmware
The department began testing three body cameras in a pilot program in 2016. Busey said the test was a success, but deploying the cameras department-wide required negotiation with the police union.
“After we went through a pilot program, we had to sit down with the union and negotiate certain conditions on when the body cameras would be used and the videos accessed,” Busey said. The cameras “sat for a while, and so during that transition some of the firmware became out of date, some of the batteries became dated in the actual devices. When we went to reactivate the program in December of 2020, we ran into some technical issues.”
Busey said he is now working with the manufacturer, Getac, and that out of fourteen patrol units, ten are currently successfully deployed with body cameras. In an email, Busey said he hopes to increase cameras in patrol units when they get to full staff by filling two openings and also get a new vehicle that will have all the right technology.
He did say this is “subject to approval of next year’s budget” but that he also intends to “equip our two detectives with body cams” bringing the total to 19 in use.
Busey said he has been personally installing and updating the body cameras himself, which requires making sure the cameras can connect with the vehicle’s docking ports correctly. This often requires replacing the docks entirely.
Costs and time
Busey previously said the cost of this program was “roughly $150,000” for hardware as well as other aspects, such as storage space. An additional $5,000 was spent to overcome the technical hurdles and Busey said “less than $200” was spent on swapping out inoperable docks.
As for how much time has been spent on getting everything up and running, Busey said the department hasn’t used that many additional hours.
“I don’t anticipate any additional significant cost beyond maybe an hour or two swapping out the inoperable docking stations. I haven’t tracked the hours,” Busey said in an email. “I would have to estimate that we’ve invested approximately 25 person hours since the systems were physically installed in getting them operational.”
When all cameras are in place, Busey said the department has “1.4” employees who are tasked with reviewing requests for body camera footage. He also said there are circumstances where he could unilaterally choose to release footage of an incident.
“That’s part of our policy too. If there is something of notable interest, an officer involved shooting, some act that is of big notoriety. Of course, we could do that right away,” Busey said.
Busey hopes the program, when fully implemented, will put them ahead of the curve in what he sees as a likely reform to be undertaken statewide.
“Every police officer in Washington state knows that body cams will be mandatory at some point very soon.”
This story was originally published May 7, 2021 at 5:30 AM.
