Manatee County Law Enforcement is one of the select counties in Florida that has not opted to integrate body-worn cameras within its ranks and yet, has found recent success utilizing automated license plate readers as a tool to combat crime in Manatee County, according to recent articles in the Bradenton Herald and WFLA.com.
The beginning of 2017 sparked a new public policy debate in the state of Florida surrounding surveillance and body camera technologies.
In 2017, the Florida state senate bill 624, co-sponsored by Senator Greg Steube (R), son of recently retired Manatee County Sheriff Brad Steube, was passed into law. SB 624 along with House Bill 305, mandates that along with establishing policy procedures for body-worn camera technologies, a provision allows law enforcement officers to review body camera footage before writing their official report or providing testimony. In the previous years of 2014 and 2015, the state legislature passed SB 226 and SB 248, two laws that were devised to create public record exemptions due to privacy concerns of individual citizens regarding automated license plate reader systems and body-worn cameras, respectively.
Despite these legal provisions attempting to address privacy concerns of individuals under information-gathering camera technologies, civil rights organizations and the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida continue to argue for citizen privacy and access to police recordings as a matter of public record in the state of Florida.
In the Florida Sheriffs Association Legislative Report for 2017, the report states in response to the passing of SB 624 and HB 305, Florida Sheriffs will, “have to update their policies and procedures related to body-worn cameras to allow an officer to review body camera footage before writing a report or making a statement about an incident.”
The Manatee County Sheriff’s Office has consistently supported the legislative agenda set by the state’s sheriffs association. In a 2015 Bradenton Herald article detailing local law enforcement reactions to the passing of HB 93, requiring law enforcement agencies to develop procedural rules for body-worn cameras, Manatee County Sheriff’s Office spokesman, Dave Bristow stated that the department was still in a holding pattern and monitoring how agencies were doing.
According to a 2013 Bulletin published by the Department of Justice on Local Police Equipment and Technology, an “estimated 32% of departments reported they provided body-worn cameras for at least some of their patrol officers.” The DOJ findings in the bulletin reported further that, “An estimated 17% of departments used automated license plate readers in 2013.”
More recently in 2017, a pilot study on Citizen Perceptions of Body-Worn Cameras in Arlington, Texas was conducted by independent research foundation, The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF). In their findings, PERF found that despite survey results indicating no differences between citizen perceptions of officers who wore or did not wear body-worn cameras, there was a reported 38 percent drop in complaints of officers trained in body-worn camera technology a year later.
Two years after the passing of HB 93 and new passages of HB 305 and SB 624, there appears to be no change in the legislative or budgetary priorities at Manatee County’s
Sheriff’s Office concerning body-worn cameras.
According to statistics featured in the office’s proposed 2017-2018 fiscal budget, the increase in service requests took five years to reach 300,000 calls, in contrast, it took the previous 20 years to reach 200,000. In light of the increased volume of service, the current operating budget is slated to rise to 13.5 million.
In January of 2017, the ACLU updated its current recommendations for Body-Camera policing, stating, “we hope that these best practices will become widespread in order to ensure that body cameras are not reduced to yet another surveillance tool, but actually serve their intended function as a check and balance on police power.”
Alex M Buono 