At just three inches tall, it could be mistaken for a pager clipped to a police officer's collar or shirt.
It's got a wide-angle lens and a little green button that lights up when it's on. And, unlike a gun, pointing a body-mounted camera tends to calm people down, say police officers who use them in Washington state and California.
If Seattle Police Officer Ian Birk had been wearing a camera on his person on Aug. 30, 2010, jurors at the recent police inquest could have seen the last moments of First Nations woodcarver John T. Williams before Birk gunned him down. What they had instead was a dashboard camera pointed the wrong way that recorded chilling audio of four shots.
Seattle City Councilmember Bruce Harrell proposed Seattle police try out body cameras in July 2010, after video surfaced of police stomping on or hitting people of color.
In the wake of the Williams' shooting and the controversial inquest, many police accountability activists are demanding the devices be used, and this time, elected leaders are listening.
Mayor Mike McGinn and Tim Burgess, the former police officer and Public Safety Committee chair, believe Seattle's finest should wear the body cams.
"There are a lot of technical questions to work through on the body cameras, but that can all be worked out," Burgess said in an e-mail to Real Change.
Even Police Chief John Diaz has publicly endorsed the idea.
But before the city's officers can clip on the cameras when they go to work, the pint-sized devices must overcome some big obstacles -- namely, uncertainty about the legality of using such cameras and privacy concerns.
Smile...
The Seattle Police Department is evaluating several body cameras made by Vievu, a Seattle-based company started by a former SPD bike officer.
SPD spokesperson Sgt. Sean Whitcomb said the department cannot use the cameras in the field at this time. Washington law requires people give their consent before anyone can record their image, he said. He said the only exception the law currently makes is for police in-car cameras.
Using body cameras is not legal, Whitcomb said.
The Lake Forest Park Police Department has a different take on the law.
For the past year, Officer Morris Parrish and a Lake Forest Park police sergeant have been wearing Vievu cameras on their chests on a trial basis under a temporary agreement struck with their police union.
They're not the only Washington police departments getting in on the action. Police in Airway Heights, Black Diamond and Orting have adopted wearable cameras. So have a number of departments across the nation, including Oakland, San Jose and Union City in California.
At Harrell's request, Mayor McGinn agreed to include the technology in the bargaining negotiations currently under way with Seattle's police officers' union. But the mayor, Harrell said, isn't pressing hard enough.
Seattle Police Officers' Guild did not return calls for comment, but in October 2010 Guild President Rich O'Neill told KIRO Radio that body cameras would be a tough sell because of the possibility that officers could embarrass people while filming them.
Wave of the future?
Advocates say body cameras in law enforcement are inevitable and will one day be as ubiquitous as cell phones, email or the in-car cameras currently mounted in all 275 of SPD's patrol cars.
They're worn on the chest, like Vievu's pager-size model, or the ear, like a small flashlight-size camera made by Taser. By recording audio and video, they're designed to capture everything that happens when an officer arrives at the scene of a crime or call, providing better evidence in court and greater accountability to citizens that police are following procedure and behaving themselves.
In Lake Forest Park, Parrish wears Vievu PVR-LE2 and is evaluating it for the department. He said he turns it on when he's approaching a citizen to make contact, mostly in traffic stops, and tells them they're being recorded.
He said he likes the results. The cameras have a way of calming people down, he said.
When the contact is over, Parrish turns the camera off. At the end of the day, at the police station, he uploads the video into a secure police computer using software that doesn't allow him to edit the footage he's taken.
The camera can record up to four hours at a stretch, but Parrish said most days he records just an hour to two hours of interaction.
Officers who use the cameras in Oakland and Union City, Calif., rave about them. They say the technology is not only much cheaper than in-car cameras, which cost about $5,000 compared with $900 for a Vievu camera, but saves them time and money investigating complaints.
When a person knows there's video of an incident, half the time they drop their complaint, said Lt. Kelly Musgrove of the Union City Police Department in California.
"The video has helped by being the non-biased third eye, so to speak, watching what's going on," Musgrove said. "Once we share with a person making a complaint that there's video, they tend to change their mind."
It has saved him many hours of needless investigation, Musgrove said. In most complaints that do go forward, the footage almost always exonerates the officer, he added. It also makes prosecuting crimes much easier, especially in California, where the law does not require police to notify people they're being recorded.
Musgrove said he once arrived at the scene of a shooting to find a man lying on the ground dying. Another man was sitting on the sidewalk, saying he did it and why he did it. All of it was caught on a body camera and admissible as evidence prior to the police reading the shooter his Miranda rights, Musgrove said.
"In the old days, it would have been 'he said, she said,' at best," Musgrove said. "We had it captured."
In July 2010, Vievu made a presentation to the Energy, Technology and Civil Rights Committee that Councilmember Bruce Harrell chairs. Based on in-car camera statistics showing that people drop complaints half the time when there's video, Vievu said the city could save roughly $3.5 million in investigation time and lawsuit losses if it adopts wearable cameras.
On or off?
Lake Forest Park's Officer Parrish has found the Vievu cameras aren't perfect.
When he goes to download video from the camera at the end of his shift, he only gets a 95 percent download rate. Whether it's the camera's fault or a problem uploading the video to the police department's computer, he's losing about 5 percent of the video he takes, he said.
Because the Vievu turns on easily, with the slide of a little bar rather than pushing in on a button, putting his seatbelt on sometimes turns the camera on, in one case capturing a phone conversation with his wife about dinner.
"The equipment is not infallible," Parrish said.
The fact that it's left to the officer to decide when to turn body cameras on and off, along with the potential for video to be lost -- or, worse, hacked -- are two troubling issues, said Jennifer Shaw, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington.
Shaw and Parrish said the cameras also present a host of privacy issues around who and what to record.
Parrish said he has wrestled with questions about whether it's appropriate to record an interview with a domestic violence victim or a family member of a person gone missing who has Alzheimer's disease.
Accountability is limited if it's up to the officer when the cameras are on, Shaw said.
"The technology is not at a point where we think [the cameras] would be effective for police accountability and protecting individual privacy," she said.
Harriett Walden, founder of Mothers for Police Accountability, supports the cameras. Without video, she said, none of the now-controversial incidents would have ever come to light.
"The privacy of the citizen is intruded on when a person is getting their behind kicked [by the police] and there's no record of it," Walden said.
Paul Bascomb, chair of SPD's African American Advisory Council, said he remains unconvinced.
"There's so much [potential for] misuse besides good use that can happen from police wearing those cameras and the invasion of privacy," Bascomb said. "I am anti-camera."
Resistance from police
Chief Diaz's endorsement aside, rank-and-file Seattle officers don't seem to welcome the technology, either, something Union City's Kelly Musgrove calls "hilarious."
He said he saw the same pushback among officers 20 years ago when departments first started issuing microcassette tape recorders.
Heidi Traverso, Vievu's director of business development and a former SPD officer, said body cameras offer the Seattle Police Department a chance to rebuild trust. Whether it's cameras made by her company or another, SPD should have them, she said.
"There's nothing to fear by having more valuable evidence," said Traverso, whose husband is an SPD patrol officer. "If your conduct is on the up-and-up and you're doing a good job, why wouldn't you want that?"
Whitcomb said the state law would need to be changed. Harrell has proposed a pilot with 30 to 50 cameras on the street by January. As in Lake Forest Park, officers would notify citizens that they're being recorded, Harrell said.
He said that under a 2006 state Supreme Court decision, Lewis v. Department of Licensing, all officers need to do is notify citizens they're being recorded. They don't have to get their consent.
Most people don't know police are always audio-recording them whenever they answer a call, he added.
A citizens committee can help determine when the cameras are on or off, he said.
It's lack of leadership, not police resistance, that's keeping cameras off the bodies of Seattle's cops, Harrell said.
"The vast majority of people, real people, understand it and want it."