A city council committee on Thursday recommended that the Keene Police Department try out body-worn cameras for a half-dozen officers, a preliminary step before deciding whether to fully implement their use.
The trial period would involve outfitting six officers and four police cruisers with cameras over a period of weeks, City Manager Elizabeth Dragon told the Finance, Organization and Personnel Committee.
The police department would then come back to the city council with the results of that trial, likely around December, for a decision on whether to commit to equipping the whole department with cameras, Police Chief Steven Russo said.
The committee voted, 5-0, to start the trial period, which the vendor does not charge for, though the department would have to pay out about $4,700 worth of overtime to train the officers. The matter now goes to the full city council for a final vote.
The topic of body cameras came before the city council earlier this summer in the wake of the George Floyd killing, after hundreds signed a petition calling on Keene to use the equipment. Petition organizers said they felt the measure would increase transparency and accountability.
In late June, the finance committee asked city staff to research the issue and report back with more details.
During Thursday’s committee meeting, held over Zoom, Russo said a group within the police department has been studying the issue. He said they were impressed by advancements in the technology since 2015, the last time the department looked into it.
Russo said he is not opposed to body cameras, but described the various legal, financial and technical questions to work out.
The system the department prefers – featuring both body cams and vehicle cameras – would cost about $380,000 for a five-year contract with the vendor, Russo said. Personnel costs for training would add about $14,000. And the department would hire a full-time paralegal to manage the video system and records requests, at a first-year cost of around $87,500.
That would break down to about $291,000 in year one and $135,000 annually thereafter, according to Russo.
Another consideration, Russo said, is that the footage would be subject to both discovery requests from lawyers and records requests from the public. That requires someone to review videos and redact sensitive elements, one reason the proposal includes a new full-time staffer.
“There’s a lot of interest, and this has to be done correctly,” Russo said. “It’s not something we can just throw together in even a couple months. There’s a lot of stakeholders out there, and there’s a lot of public concern over this, and as anything else the department does … we need to do it correctly.”
He and Dragon said the city council should be mindful of what it wants to achieve with body cameras. They contrasted Keene police with departments elsewhere that they said have worse relationships with their communities.
Dragon said that’s an important part of the cost-benefit analysis, noting that she had a bit of “sticker shock” on seeing the estimated costs.
“A lot of the national conversation around this topic has been focused on increasing accountability of police departments, and especially where they need to mend frayed relationships between a police department and a community,” she said. “And it’s been focused on reducing complaints around excessive use of force by police officers.
“Last year, the city of Keene had four – four – use of force complaints, out of 4,155 custodial arrests, which resulted in 228 uses of force,” she added.
Councilors on the panel acknowledged the complexities, and said it’s worthwhile to start the trial run and keep discussing the issue.
“My thinking has always been that it just gives us our general peace of mind, not only on police behavior but also on citizen behavior,” Ward 3 Councilor Terry M. Clark said. “And I don’t know if that’s really gauge-able.”
Ward 5 Councilor Thomas F. Powers, the committee chairman and a former Keene police chief, outlined some of the factors the city council will need to consider.
“I agree with what the chief has said. It’s a project that’s very important, it’s worthwhile, and it can be a very good project,” he said. “But it’s expensive, and if we’re going to rate projects on what the sustainability over time is, and what the results are, we need to be able to do that with this particular project, too.”
This is not the first time Keene has considered acquiring body cameras. In 2015, a committee within the Keene Police Department spent six months evaluating the issue, even visiting Burlington, Vt., to learn about that city’s use of body cams.
At the time, then-Police Chief Brian Costa said the study group found body cams could benefit both civilians – by increasing police accountability – and officers by protecting them against false allegations of misconduct.
But there were also concerns about the cost and how to balance the public’s right to know against the privacy of people caught on camera, according to minutes from a city council committee meeting in November of that year.
The following year, the N.H. Legislature attempted to address those concerns, amending the state’s public-records law to specifically address body cameras.
Under the current law, body-cam video is exempt from public disclosure unless it captures a police officer using force or restraining someone; a weapon being fired; or an encounter that results in a felony-level arrest.
But even in those cases, a police department may withhold parts of a video that would be an invasion of privacy if released or are exempt under a different provision of the law.
On Thursday, City Attorney Thomas Mullins noted that someone on city staff would still have to review the requested footage, making those judgment calls.
“Transparency to one person is an invasion of privacy or rights to another person,” he said.
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