Two years after starting the process to have uniformed Little Rock officers deploy body cameras, the state's largest municipal law enforcement agency is ready to accept bids for body camera models in the coming weeks.
The Little Rock Police Department and the Little Rock city attorney's office is working to develop a body camera policy that balances personal privacy rights with departmental transparency, said Little Rock Assistant Police Chief Alice Fulk.
"We're doing this the right way by taking it step by step, and considering everything at each step instead of jumping in headfirst and not really realizing the ramifications," Fulk said.
The bids received by the department will provide a number of details about the body camera system -- the storage capacity, where it is mounted on an officer and whether footage can be redacted.
The camera policy should be finalized by the Little Rock city attorney's office by the time the Police Department selects a body camera system, Fulk said.
Civil-rights activists across the nation have long called for police officers to wear body cameras, and even more so since the 2014 fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, by a white officer in Ferguson, Mo., just outside St. Louis. The U.S. Justice Department later concluded that the officer had acted in self-defense.
About a third of the nation's 18,000 police agencies are either testing body cameras or have embraced them to record their officers' interactions with the public.
Little Rock police tested four different types of body cameras last year after it created a committee in October 2014 to explore the use of body cameras for uniformed officers.
When the cameras were tested, officers in the department's Northwest and Southwest divisions found that uploading the videos to the system took too long due to slow Internet speeds.
All divisions are now updated with fiber-optic Internet, Fulk said.
The body camera policy -- when released -- will outline where and in what situations officers are to record their actions.
Officers sometimes enter residences and businesses, Fulk said. But without a proper policy, footage of those situations could be made public under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, she said.
"We're looking for transparency, but you've got to balance that out with also not violating anyone's rights to privacy," she said.
Police respond to emergency medical situations, sexual-assault calls and scenarios involving children -- all calls that could invade a person's privacy if a body camera is recording and is later released, Fulk said.
"There's a lot of misconceptions out there," she said. "I think people sometimes think it's going to be a solve-all."
Officials also anticipate an increase in public record requests for footage as a result of the body cameras, something that can come with a price tag for the Police Department.
"The cost is not in the camera, the cost is in the maintenance and the redaction" of images for privacy purposes, said Little Rock City Attorney Tom Carpenter.
He said Arkansas has a liberal public records law that can allow residents to request large amounts of information, which can take time for employees to provide and redact.
Fulk said the department will likely have to double their two-person Freedom of Information Act squad to handle the expected increases in requests for footage.
Tommy Hudson, Little Rock Fraternal Order of Police president, said he understands the reasons why body cameras are in vogue, but he cautioned that cameras do not always provide a complete accounting of what went down.
"That one little box, that one camera, that one little view right there is not going to tell you what's actually going on or the fear that's going on in an officer's mind," he said.
Hudson said that having a visible body camera can encourage compliance from reluctant members of the public.
Most uniformed officers don't mind having a body camera, Fulk said, and many see them as a form of protection, a way to set the record straight in a contentious situation.
"I think that everyone, police included, feel like it would make everything more transparent," she said.
Information for this article was provided by The Associated Press.
Metro on 10/18/2016