FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office recently became one of the last departments in South Florida to equip its deputies with body cameras. Now, it is one of the first in the state to use cameras that livestream.
“It took some time,” Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said at a news conference Thursday that highlighted the cameras’ livestreaming capabilities. “But I think that the time we took put us up to where we need to be.”
Over the past six years, as local police agencies throughout the county joined a growing number of departments across the U.S that use body cameras, the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office held back. Bradshaw said repeatedly that he would equip his deputies with the cameras if the county provided all of the money, but he did not think the technology was “where it needed to be.”
Now, 25 PBSO deputies wear the cutting-edge cameras, manufactured by a company called Axon, strapped to their chests. The number will soon increase; the Sheriff’s Office is rolling out the body cameras gradually, in groups of 25 deputies at a time, Bradshaw said.
The footage can be streamed live to the deputies’ supervisors, a function that both the deputies and the supervisors have the ability to activate.
Bradsaw said that he doesn’t know of many other departments in Florida that use the livestreaming technology. PBSO is “a little bit ahead of the curve” when it comes to hardware and software, he said.
The technology is new and largely untested, and Palm Beach County will be one of the first agencies in Florida, and the country, to employ it. The increase in the cameras’ capabilities could improve public safety, but also opens a door for more widespread surveillance.
Currently, livestreaming body cameras are in use by Daytona Beach and University of Central Florida police. Broward Sheriff’s Office began using body cameras in 2016, but they do not have livestreaming capabilities, said Claudinne Caro, a spokesperson for the department. She did not respond to questions asking whether BSO will look into funding them in the future.
A long time coming
The Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office was one of the last departments in South Florida without body cameras in 2020, when Bradshaw said he was in talks with commission leaders about acquiring the cameras.
“It’s not a matter of ‘if,’” Bradshaw said at the time. “It’s a matter of when.”
The Sheriff’s Office was ready to purchase the cameras in 2020, Bradshaw had said, but he was waiting for the county to set aside $19 million for them. The Sheriff’s Office has a budget of over $800 million, but Bradshaw wanted the money to come from the county.
The money arrived three years later in the form of sales tax revenue, according to John Jamason, a county spokesperson.
County commissioners allocated over $22 million for the cameras, surpassing Bradshaw’s initial ask. He said he had spent about $10 million to $12 million to far, and planned to continue asking for the funding from the county over the next 10 years, totaling about $70 million.
“We told them all along, you give us the money, we’ll do it,” Bradshaw said Thursday. “And here’s the proof.”
The county said that it would have found another way to allocate the money, had the Sheriff’s Office asked for it.
But Bradshaw said Thursday that his office had other reasons for the long wait: he wanted to implement the cameras only when “state of the art” technology was available.
“It’s kind of like your laptops,” Bradshaw said. “You buy one today, next year, there’s a better model. Or golf clubs where they make a better driver.”
How will the cameras work?
Deputies will have to activate their new body cameras in a number of situations, including traffic stops, crimes in progress, arrests, searches, and “citizen contacts that become adversarial,” according to the Sheriff’s Office body camera policy.
The cameras also will begin recording automatically when a deputy draws a gun.
But deputies will livestream from those cameras only “in the most exigent circumstances,” the policy states.
In those circumstances, a supervisor will watch the livestream while on scene in a nearby vehicle, Bradshaw said. The supervisor will then communicate over radio, using the livestream footage to help guide the deputy.
Possible situations include when a deputy calls for emergency backup, when a deputy has been “feloniously or seriously injured,” and when a deputy is involved in a serious collision, according to the policy.
Those could be hostage situations, car chases, or robberies in progress, Bradshaw said. The technology also could provide “a tactical advantage” in active-shooter situations, as the Cincinnati Police Department, the first agency to use livestreaming body cameras, suggested to the Washington Post in 2020.
Accountability or surveillance?
Critics of livestreaming body cameras have argued that they could pave the way for more widespread surveillance of the public.
Farhang Heydari, executive director of the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law, said the technology could be used in a limited way at first, as the PBSO policy proposes, but eventually run into something called “mission creep,” a gradual expansion of the technology’s use beyond its original scope.
He pointed to regular body cameras, which he said “started as an accountability tool and became more a surveillance tool,” as well as license-plate readers, where the technology “used to find stolen cars originally, and now Oklahoma uses it to find people who don’t have insurance.”
Livestreaming combined with facial recognition software theoretically could allow officers to identify people just by walking around, Heydari said.
The Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office is one of the most prolific users of facial-recognition technology in the state, the South Florida Sun Sentinel found in a 2021 investigation. The majority of those uses, or nearly 60%, involved Black people, which exceeds the area’s Black population and arrest rates.
“Once you have real-time capability, you can run facial recognition technology on that and start identifying people on the street,” Heydari said. “Tie that to a warrant database, and then one day as you’re walking down the street, it’s pinging people on open warrants or unpaid tickets.”
When asked for comment Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida pointed to a 2016 op-ed it had published against the technology, arguing that it could tip the scales from police oversight to infringing on peoples’ privacy.
“The centralized live-streaming of body cameras would instantly super-charge the surveillance powers of the authorities, especially in communities that are already heavily policed,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst for the ACLU, wrote. “... Live monitoring significantly disrupts the careful controls and balances that are necessary if police body cameras are to strike the right balance between oversight and privacy.”
Stanley also argued that remote activation of the livestreaming function, which PBSO allows, means that the footage also might infringe on the privacy of officers themselves.
Pressed on the privacy issues Thursday, Bradshaw said that there will be a constant review process, where each district will select body cameras at random and examine the footage. He also said that the footage won’t be going to a centralized monitoring station, but directly to the supervisor stationed nearby in a vehicle.
The department policy states that “only those members with an immediate operational need shall access and view the video livestreams.” That access will require approval from “a Command Duty Officer, Officer in Charge of critical incident, or a member of the senior executive staff.”
Heydari suggested that the policy should be more specific and include clear limits, such as a statement that states that facial-recognition software will not be used in real time. But he also thinks the community needs more than an internal policy.
“Even better is for there to be kind of democratic checks on this,” he said. “I would rather there be a city council or county supervisors’ rule that says livestreaming can only be used for the following purposes, and be really specific about it.”
Could livestreaming prevent misconduct?
PBSO’s announcement came less than three weeks after the much-anticipated body camera footage was released that captured Memphis police officers beating Tyre Nichols to death, raising questions over the merits of body cameras when it comes to accountability.
Bradshaw has long argued that body cameras do not prevent misconduct. On Thursday, he cited Nichols’ death as an example.
“Don’t for a minute think it’s going to stop something from happening,” he said. “Look at Memphis. Those guys had body cams; that didn’t stop them from inappropriate conduct.”
Body cameras, Bradshaw maintained, are “after the fact.” But he also said that livestreaming technology will allow deputies to “control the outcome rather than look at what the outcome was.”
Asked whether he believes livestreaming could have prevented what happened in Memphis, Bradshaw said “possibly.”
“It depends on who was reviewing it,” he continued. “... But if you go back to George Floyd, Memphis, and all these other places that have had these problems, right, you can always turn it back to it’s bad training, it’s bad policy, and it’s bad supervision.”
Heydari said that it is possible the livestreaming function could help prevent misconduct, but he was wary of how often that would actually happen, and whether it would be enough to outweigh the potential harms.
“In theory I could see if an officer is in a tense situation, being able to communicate with a supervisor who can see the situation for example, it might be helpful if the supervisor can give the officer advice about how to deescalate,” he said. “The question is, how often is that happening, versus it’s being used as a surveillance tool?”
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