Pierce County Sheriff’s deputies need body cameras. Let’s hope for progress this week

This week Pierce County leaders will start debating how to equip nearly 300 Sheriff’s Department patrol deputies with body cameras. Sheriff Paul Pastor will appear before the County Council, describe the pros and cons of the technology, declare his support for it and lay the groundwork for his successor to implement it.

Do we wish this had happened long ago? That Pastor had exerted more influence on body cameras in his two-decade reign as sheriff? That it hadn’t taken the death of a Black man in Tacoma police custody, a clumsy sheriff’s investigation and protests in the streets to bring it about?

Yes, yes and yes.

Recently we said Tacoma leaders had failed by dithering over body cameras for five years. The same is true of Pierce County leaders.

But rather than focus on the past, let’s press the expectation that local politicians will authorize and fund a robust body-camera program forthwith.

“I think it’s the right thing to do,” Pastor told the TNT editorial page editor Monday. “I’ve felt that way for a while, and so have my people. And I think there’s an opportunity now because of our country’s constantly unresolved racial divide.”

Here’s how it’s likely to unfold when the County Council holds a special meeting Wednesday morning at 9:30.

The three Democrats on council will explain why they’re sponsoring a proposal authorizing body cameras: to hold deputies more accountable and bolster community confidence.

Does it put pressure on the county now that Tacoma has finally committed to body cameras, which Seattle and Spokane have had for years, and plans to roll out 255 of them in the first three months of 2021?

Not necessarily, says Marty Campbell, a first-term County Council member and former Tacoma City Council member. “We have two governments that are equally motivated and both asking the question: If not now, when?” Campbell told us Monday.

Pastor will say he likes the idea of cameras and agrees public trust is important. He’ll say being recorded could help tame aggressiveness on both sides of an encounter, and that preserving camera footage could make it easier to investigate complaints.

But the sheriff will also warn that his office could be overwhelmed trying to comply with Washington’s public disclosure laws. It’ll take hundreds of thousands of dollars to store, preserve, redact and distribute body-cam images on public request.

He’ll also voice concern that residents’ privacy rights may be violated by unscrupulous requestors. He may cite a hypothetical example of deputies responding to a senior citizen wandering the streets, naked and disoriented, then later seeing images exploited on social media.

“I want to be careful about re-victimizing victims, about misuse and about (cameras) being used as a profit center,” he said Monday.

Several roadblocks will need to be moved, Pastor said. He’s right. So we urge elected leaders to get to work moving them.

Approving a body-cam authorization ordinance this month is only a baby step; its language is non-committal, calling for cameras to be deployed “on a schedule consistent with the acquisition of resources.”

That’s meaningless unless the county budgets money for equipment, training, records management and staff. Meanwhile, the funding picture is clouded financially by plunging tax revenues, and politically by activist-led demands to “defund the police.”

However things play out in the next few weeks, this is a conversation that can’t be put off any longer.

A national movement confronting police violence and racial injustice may have started in distant cities like Minneapolis and Louisville. But it hit Tacoma like a freight train this summer after the death of Manuel Ellis was ruled a police-involved homicide.

Then it hit the sheriff’s department; its investigators were assigned to conduct an outside review of Ellis’ death but failed to meet the requirements of a new state law.

Pastor will be gone at the end of 2020, along with four of the seven current County Council members. But there’s still time this year for leaders to create inexorable momentum for a Sheriff’s Department body-camera program.

They can, and they must.

This story was originally published August 4, 2020 at 9:00 AM.