Police body cameras get yes vote from Madison City Council | #citycouncil

The council voted 16-4 to greenlight the 90-day pilot program despite some members’ misgivings about the police department’s plans for the initiative, potentially putting the city far away from a full deployment of the cameras. 

Council members complained that some of the guidelines for the pilot program stray from recommendations made by a committee tasked with drafting how the technology should work in the city.

Namely, the pilot program won’t collect data on criminal proceedings against those filmed by officers, figures that the city can’t collect anyway. And fears that the use of cameras will lead to more people of color being charged with low-level offenses if prosecutors have access to the footage have been a key complaint against cameras for years. 

By far the largest community in the Midwest to not use body cameras, according to a recent analysis of 71 Midwest law enforcement agencies by Lee Enterprises, Madison has been an steadfast holdout. 

Supporters of the cameras recognized that the cameras alone will not address racial disparities in the local criminal justice system. But they will bring a needed layer of transparency, one already widely used across the country, supporters said. 

“It’s time to get on with the pilot,” said Isadore Knox, who represents parts of the South Side. “Let’s get the data we can get.” 

Debate on the council floor about the cameras lasted until about 11:45 p.m., with discussion veering away from cameras and into how officers write reports, the role of confidential informants in court proceedings and references to the 1950s lynching of Emmett Till. 

Ald. Juliana Bennett, who represents Downtown and areas near campus, listed high-profile police killings of people of color in the United States that were filmed but didn’t lead to prosecution for the officers involved. 

“Their murders were filmed, and yet they were still murdered and many of those officers were not charged, indicted or anything,” Bennett said. 

City Council vice president Yannette Figueroa Cole named other episodes of police violence in Madison such as the 2015 killing of Tony Robinson by Officer Matt Kenny. Kenny remains on the city’s police force, Figueroa Cole said. 

The Dane County District Attorney’s Office and a judge have refused to charge Kenny multiple times, most recently in June.  

Bennett and Figueroa Cole voted against the pilot program. Council members Sabrina Madison, 17th District, and Nikki Conklin, 9th District, joined them.  

Police Chief Shon Barnes said Tuesday he wouldn’t be surprised if the city didn’t deploy cameras citywide even after the pilot program. But the data collected in the program will be able to inform the city’s next steps, the chief saiid. 

“Some people think you can do a pilot and the pilot’s going to say you absolutely have to have this, or you absolutely do not need this,” Barnes said. “But we need to have clear information about what the full implementation would look like, what vendors would look like, what data would look like.” 

The guidelines for the pilot program that Barnes personally wrote diverge from recommendations made by the city’s Body-Worn Camera Feasibility Review Committee. Those include rules for when camera footage gets shared with prosecutors, whether officers can watch footage before writing reports, how long footage gets stored and more. 

Some of the committee’s recommendations do not follow state law and so were not incorporated into the police department’s guidelines for the pilot program, Barnes and City Attorney Michael Haas have said. 

In response, the city council added language to its resolution authorizing the pilot program that urges but does not require the police department to get its body camera guidelines closer to the committee’s recommendations. Other language added by council members requires Madison police to provide a budget estimate for citywide use of the cameras within 60 days of the pilot program’s end. 

Before the council vote, a group of leaders in the city’s Black community urged the council to approve the pilot program. Those speakers said that body cameras are an additional tool for transparency and not a panacea to the city’s problems with racial disparities in the criminal justice system. 

Dane County Judge Everett Mitchell noted that body camera footage might have shed light on the moments that led up to the shooting of Robinson by Officer Kenny back in 2015. 

“We’ve never seen Tony’s perspective,” Mitchell said. “Not to give this an opportunity really does weaken our criminal justice system.”