Akash Sama­roo

While the Po­lice Com­plaints Au­thor­i­ty (PCA) is hap­py that Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice (CoP) Er­la Christo­pher-Hare­wood has sound­ed the call for body cam­eras to be worn, her of­fi­cers are hop­ing to re­ceive nec­es­sary and con­tin­u­ous train­ing in their use.

On Mon­day, the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) said there are cur­rent­ly 1,120 body worn cam­eras in cir­cu­la­tion and the com­mis­sion­er has giv­en “ex­plic­it in­struc­tions to all di­vi­sion­al heads and heads of units and sec­tions, re­gard­ing the manda­to­ry use of body worn cam­eras, by of­fi­cers who were is­sued with such de­vices.”

The TTPS said 2,000 more are on the way.

How­ev­er, speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, pres­i­dent of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice So­cial and Wel­fare As­so­ci­a­tion (TTPSS­WA), Gideon Dick­son, said their on­ly con­cern at this time is the is­sue of train­ing.

Dick­son said the last time they were trained was sev­er­al years ago and it was a one-off event.

He said, “We would want all our of­fi­cers who have been trained in the past and have not utilised the gad­gets over the last three months to at least be giv­en a re­fresh­er course in the train­ing of the ap­pa­ra­tus and be cer­ti­fied and then there­after be it on a six month or year­ly ba­sis we can have a re­cer­ti­fi­ca­tion course so best prac­tice could be de­vel­oped and main­tained.”

Dick­son said train­ing is nec­es­sary as it’s not as sim­ple as turn­ing the de­vices on and off.

He added: “You would want him or her to be able to put it on when it needs to go on, be able to cap­ture the da­ta up­on com­ple­tion, sub­mit it to the rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties for it to be stored in the cloud and re­trieved through IT spe­cial­ists.”

A pi­lot project for body­worn cam­eras was launched in 2017. How­ev­er, Dick­son said at the time there was no guid­ance pol­i­cy for its use and of­fi­cers.

“So you had no pol­i­cy to guide da­ta cap­tur­ing and shar­ing. It means then the of­fi­cers will be sec­ond guess­ing them­selves, so at the time train­ing was there, there were lim­it­ed of­fi­cers ex­posed to it and lim­it­ed de­vices,” he said.

A se­nior TTPS of­fi­cer told Guardian Me­dia that such a pol­i­cy ex­ists in their stan­dard op­er­at­ing pro­ce­dures.

Mean­while, the PCA, which has long called for the use of body cams, said it an­tic­i­pates pos­i­tive out­comes from this ini­tia­tive.

In a state­ment sent to Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, the PCA said, “There is ev­i­den­tiary val­ue that body worn cam­eras (BWC) would bring in de­cid­ing whether to charge an in­di­vid­ual as the BWC, once used as in­tend­ed, should re­flect ex­act­ly what tran­spired. This may have the re­sul­tant ef­fect of im­prov­ing the work­ing en­vi­ron­ment of the po­lice of­fi­cer, who can be at rel­a­tive ease in car­ry­ing out his du­ties know­ing that the BWC may pro­vide ev­i­dence of po­lice cit­i­zen in­ter­ac­tions and can po­ten­tial­ly in­su­late or re­fute friv­o­lous al­le­ga­tions against the of­fi­cer.”

The au­thor­i­ties, how­ev­er, want to see ev­i­dence that it is be­ing used.

“The PCA is hope­ful that the TTPS will pro­duce da­ta which speaks to the suc­cess of this project. For the po­lice to ef­fec­tive­ly solve crimes, there must be TRUST be­tween the com­mu­ni­ty and the po­lice. The use of BWCs is one way of gain­ing that trust,” it said.