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GREENSBORO, NC – The shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri has thousands of people calling for all police officers to wear body cameras.
Ferguson Police have them, but haven’t started using them.
Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department says its in the process of buying 160 body cameras.
WCCB’s Audrina Bigos traveled to Greensboro, one of the only cities in the state where body cameras are being used.
Officer Mary Flynt with the Greensboro Police Department wears her camera on her collar or sunglasses.
“I’m going to turn my camera on just in case anything happens,” said Flynt during WCCB’s ride along. Flynt used the camera during a burglary call and a traffic stop.
The body cameras are always on, showing what police see and do. But the officers control when they record.
“Let’s just say he stepped out of the car real quick then I would probably turn it back on cause I don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Flynt.
“When the officer is done at the end of their shift, this camera will have that officers day’s worth of video on that camera,” said Lt. Chris Schultheis.
“Once a recording is made on the camera, it cannot be removed from the camera. Officers cannot edit it in any way. It cannot be deleted,” said Schultheis.
Video from Greensboro’s 300 body cameras are stored for a minimum of 6 months.
Sergeant Stephanie Mardis works in professional standards and internal affairs to watch video to resolve complaints and evaluate use of force.
“It’s a perfect piece of evidence and it’s very compelling in court,” said Mardis. So far this year, video footage has been used to determine that 25 citizen concerns were meritless.
“I know that if someone complains about me on this call, they can see what I did, they have no question about what I did,” said Flynt.
The video is not available to the public because it’s part of the officer’s personnel file or part of a criminal investigation. That is one of the biggest concerns of the American Civil Liberties Union, which wants all officers to wear cameras.
“This is a tool for accountability and it shouldn’t just go one way. If a citizen has a complaint against a police officer and that’s on video, that’s something the citizen should have access to,” said Mike Meno, with the ACLU of North Carolina.
CMPD is in the bidding process for body cameras, but there’s no timeline for purchasing them. More than 1,200 agencies in the country already use the cameras.
