Brooklyn will see more cops wearing body cameras
More Brooklyn cops will start using body cams in June, NYPD officials said Monday.
“Next month, [more] officers in Brooklyn will begin wearing the cameras, followed by more precincts in each of the five boroughs in successive
months through the fall,” Police Commissioner James O’Neill said at a City Council hearing on public safety.
The police already had a much smaller pilot program for the cameras that started in 2014. The body-cams were mandated by a judge who found that city cops were violating the civil rights of men and women — the majority of whom were African American or Hispanic — during stop-and-frisks.
O’Neill said more body cams were then given to officers in Inwood and Washington Heights in Manhattan in April so the
NYPD could better evaluate their use.
The program expanding in Brooklyn and elsewhere “is much more extensive than was required by the court,” O’Neill noted. “And as a
department, we have been eager to move forward on this.”
He said about 1,200 cops in 20 commands would wear the cameras during the expanded pilot.
Within two years, he said, all patrol cops will be wearing them.
“This is the evolution of policing,” he said. “And we have to evolve.
Because if we’re not evolving, we’re not moving forward as a police department, or as a city.”
Cops will likely have to notify people when they are recording except in certain situations, suggested rules released by the NYPD last month
show.
Additional reporting by Rich Calder