London Police Are Recording Their Patrols with Body Cameras

Britain is one of the most watched countries in the UK, with an estimated 5.9 million security cameras across the country—one for every 11 people—as of 2013. Now the city of London just got 500 more digital eyes on it, in the form of cameras worn by police officers.

The London Metropolitan Police Service is trialling the cameras across ten boroughs, starting today. It’s thought to be the largest pilot of the technology in the world, and results from the trial will be reviewed before any decisions are made about further roll-outs.

The devices used are Axon Body Cameras, made by Taser, and they’re intended mainly to collect evidence and “speed up justice.” They're also meant to ensure officers are on their best behavior. In a release, the Met Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe said, “I believe it will also show our officers at their best, dealing with difficult and dangerous situations every day but it will also provide clearer evidence when its been alleged that we got things wrong. That has to be in both our own and the public’s interest.”

With that, he’s no doubt referring to incidents like the death of Mark Duggan. Duggan was shot dead by police in 2011, an incident that led to riots across the country. The exact details of the incident were disputed and in the wake of those tensions; Hogan-Howe said armed officers would test the body-worn cameras in an attempt to improve transparency.

The cameras won’t be always-on, but will be turned on “in incidents such as domestic abuse and public order but also for potentially contentious interactions such as the use of stop and search.”

I rang the Met to ask more about under what specific circumstances video would be recorded, and a spokesperson told me, “Primarily, it’s at the officer’s discretion.” I asked if “public order” incidents could include, for instance, protests. “It could be protests, it could be policing demonstrations, that kind of thing,” he said. That footage could then be used for evidence such as identifying people, he confirmed.

And that’s where the technology goes from surveilling the police to surveilling the public, as Motherboard’s Meghan Neal pointed out with a similar project in the US, and it’s at that point that the real purpose of these cameras seems a little more one-sided.

While this is spun partly as a way of empowering the public and holding officers to account, and while video cameras are undoubtedly able to capture more solid details than witness testimonies, this kind of recording simply can’t be completely objective. Just like anyone else with a video camera, the subjective decision of when to use it and what to do with the footage can have a great impact.

In this case, for instance, the police will maintain control over the footage they’ve collected. It’s stored on a cloud-based server for 31 days, and kept for longer only if it’s needed for evidential purposes—but presumably only they have the authority to decide whether to keep it or not.

The Met says that members of the public will be warned “as soon as practical” that they’re being recorded, but the ability to do this would obviously be limited in instances like protests where you have lots of people to inform.

On the other side of the coin, the police have in the past been less than delighted at having the cameras turned on them—though the Met’s guidance asserts that the public does have a right to film in public places, including filming police officers.

It’s surely only a matter of time until we see a photographic stand-off, with police and citizens filming each other simultaneously, just waiting for the other to slip up.