Italy and bodycams: why do our police forces use them so little?

THE recent news events revive the debate on the need to oblige the forces of order to wear bodycams and identification plates with serial numbers and a bill presented by Senator Ilaria Cucchi to November 2022 and so far remained stationary in Parliament.

Our attempt to obtain statements both by the Ministry of the Interior and by Senator Cucchi failed: the Viminale sent us a brief statement which refers to a circular (we will talk about it further below), the senator explained that she could not respond “for personal reasons”.

However, we assessed the situation as a whole, coping the bodycam topic from multiple points of view. Let’s go in order.

What are bodycams

They are devices predisposed to record audio, images and videos and which (in addition to being used by various police forces and intervention agencies abroad) are clear in our imagination thanks to the iconography of the police television genre.

In January 2022, the Ministry of the Interior published the guidelines to regulate the use of about 1000 bodycams purchased and distributed to national law enforcement agencies.

The limits of use of bodycams

With the circular 555/III-OP/DIV.1 of 18 January 2022, the ministry has assigned 700 bodycams to the 15 mobile departments of the state police and 249 to the carabinieri. The directive literally mentions that they are to be used in situations of risk as “a further instrument for documenting events and, at the same time, for protecting the operating personnel”.

In the circular appear the rules relating to the use of bobycams and those relating to technical-technological procedures, according to which the acquired data can only be processed by an authorized operator, who also has the task of transferring the files to dedicated servers, where they will be kept for 6 months. Agents can only start the recording on express order of the service manager and the files can only be consulted immediately if necessary to maintain order public or for other urgent reasons. If an agent were to unintentionally operate the bodycam, the captured files should be immediately deleted.

The privacy aspect

The guarantor for privacy, evaluate the national and supranational provisions and, taking into account that bodycams collect personal data, issued in 2017 opinions 6197012 and 6197365 to regulate the principles that public offices must comply with in the use of technologies. Privacy issues have been addressed prior to the adoption of body cameras in 2022. In this regard, the guarantor returned to the topic in 2021especially taking into account the legislative decree 101/2018 which expressly refers to the GDPR.

The debate has been long and the guarantor, while allowing the use of bodycams, has continuous recording is prohibited, decreeing that among the admitted files there are photos, videos and audios, in addition to the date, time and geographical coordinates of their acquisition. Also, as soon as the data is transferred to the target servers, it must be removed from the body cams’ storage memory.

All we know

In Italy the debate on the tools of identification and defense with which to equip the forces of order returns with current periodicity, cases that do not only concern Verona, not only the state police And they also have resonance abroad.

The bodycams they are already in possession of our police forceswhile the Senator Cucchi requests that they be used in a more incisive way to protect both citizens both the agents who do their job in an exemplary way.

Releasing an interview with the Huffington Post the day the bill was introduced (therefore in November 2022), the senator said that “to extend the use of bodycams, a circular from the Department of Public Safety and a preventive comparison with the personnel representative organizations which, from the Silp CGIL to the autonomous ones, are sufficient they have shared this line for some time. The first to want the cameras can’t help but be the policewomen and the policemen, who during all events they are now immortalized by thousands of mobile phones ready to capture any behavior. With bodycams, at least in part, there would be a rebalancing and greater protection also for citizens through images certified by the State, without the risk of manipulation”.

It is true that the union acronyms are mostly in favor of adopting bodycamsand this can facilitate their systematic adoption, as can i unions of the Penitentiary Police, which push in the same direction.

As they do in other countries

We remain in Europe, where individual countries must take account of GDPR regulations. There are numerous police forces that make regular use of bodycams, among these we mention those Belgian, German, British, SwedishDanish and Finnish.

The privacy problem finds a shared solution: people’s faces are obscured and a digital twin of possible suspects or fugitives is created, whom the police are looking for according to parameters such as height, build, colors of clothes worn at the time the crime was committed and not based on photographs of their faces.

The solutions are theretherefore the adoption of bodycams depends above all on the will of the legislator.

The utility of bodycams

To find a non-partisan opinion we consulted i data from the Bureau of Justice Statisticsa sort of American Istat focused on crime statistics, which in 2018 it looked into the effectiveness of bodycams, drawing up a ranking of the benefits they bring. Which would be these:

· safety of the agents

· improvement of quality of evidence acquired

· reduction of complaints by civilians

· reduction of responsibility of the agents

This list proves that bodycams are bipartisan, their use is beneficial to the forces of order and justice in general as to the community. It is expected, at least in principle, that the adoption of bodycams is also important to law enforcement, because they allow field agents to work in a more protected way and away from any criticism.

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What the studies say

Beyond the discussion on the need to adopt bodycams, it is worth entering the practical domain on the basis of the many studies published in those countries where they are already in use to the police.

These surveys do not expressly state that the adoption of bodycams has brought benefits: either they reveal that no positive effects have been recorded or they judge the results to be “promising”. A study of data from eight American and British police precincts dating back to 2016 concluded that the use of bodycams produced no significant differences in the use of force by agents, nor in the complaints presented by citizens.

in Washington, in 2017, no significant changes were noted nor in the use of force by the agents, nor in the number of complaints filed by citizens against the forces of order. In New York, mixed effects were revealed: although no substantial changes were recorded in the number of arrests made by force, the number of arrests significantly decreased number of complaints filed against the work of officers equipped with bodycams.

Different indications come from an analysis conducted in 2018 on the work of the Metropolitan Police Department in Las Vegasfrom which it appears that the contribution of the bodycams has resulted in both a lower number of arrests made by force and a significant decrease in the complaints filed against the agents.

Two years earlier in Phoenix (Arizona) and limited to police interventions in cases of domestic violence, the use of the bodycam made it possible to better document the scenes which presented themselves in the eyes of the agents, resulting in a higher number of convictions precisely by virtue of the more exhaustive collection of evidence. Also in Phoenix, two different ones studies carried out in 2017 and 2020 on all police bodies equipped with bodycams have determined that there has been a greater use of force by the agents and that, against this, complaints from citizens have decreased. The relationship between body cams and the number of arrests has not been clearly recognized.

In conclusion, it should be considered that even the statistics and studies judged to be devoid of benefits are united by the fewer complaints of the community with respect to the work of the police forces. This trend also benefits law enforcement, confirming at least the defensive nature of bodycams.