City and law enforcement leaders in Kenosha, Wisconsin, unanimously endorsed the use of body cameras in 2017 as a way to increase police accountability and collect evidence at scenes of domestic violence, among other benefits.
But since then, they have balked at the price tag, raised policy concerns and put off implementation. The delays meant that officers who were on the scene of Sunday’s shooting of Jacob Blake while responding to a domestic call were not equipped with technology that could give their perspective on an incident that has roiled the nation.
“This is a tragedy. But at least some good could come from this if this is finally the incident where Kenosha says, ‘we’ve got to get body cameras on these cops right away’,” said Kevin Mathewson, a former member of the common council.
Kenosha Mayor John Antaramian confirmed Monday that current plans call for the city to buy them in 2022 — more than five years after he endorsed their adoption. Kenosha officers do have cameras in their squad cars, but it’s unclear whether any captured the shooting.
Mathewson pushed the city to buy cameras during his tenure on the council from 2012 to 2017, saying he saw them as a tool to remove bad police officers from the department after a series of troubling use-of-force and misconduct incidents. Body cameras became particularly popular nationwide as a way to improve policing after the 2014 fatal shooting of Michael Brown, a Black 18-year-old, by a white officer in Ferguson, Missouri.
Mathewson recalled proposing a budget amendment to buy the equipment in early 2017 and hitting resistance from the mayor, police chief and other council members, who argued that would be unwise without clear state regulations governing their use.
Kenosha initially planned to buy the cameras this year, but funding shortfalls and technological concerns prompted the city to push that back to 2022, said Rocco LaMacchia, chairman of the council’s public safety committee.
“We have moved it back so many times,” he said. “I got a feeling this is going to move up on the ladder really fast because of what’s going on around the United States right now. Body cameras are a necessity. There’s no doubt about it.”
Of the Blake shooting, he said, “The body camera footage on this one would have told right from wrong right away.”
The city’s current plans call for purchasing 175 Axon body cameras from Taser International and a five-year evidence storage and maintenance plan in 2022. After the first year, the city would incur an estimated $145,000 cost annually for using Evidence.com to store video evidence.
He said the cameras are helpful but have not turned out to be the game-changing reform that many had hoped. One reason: Some officers fail to activate their cameras during life-and-death encounters, he said.
An increasing number of studies also suggest the cameras do not change how often officers use force.
In Milwaukee, officers used slightly less force after starting to wear cameras at first but then returned quickly to normal levels, said Daniel Lawrence, a researcher at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., who studied their adoption.
