Expect the Honolulu Police Department to gradually begin rolling out body cameras for officers by the end of the summer, Chief Susan Ballard said this week.
HPD has not yet selected a vendor for the program, Ballard said, but the intent is to start a “slow rollout” in late summer, beginning with the District 1 Central Honolulu patrol district, which runs from about Makiki and Ala Moana to Chinatown.
The department hopes to have all of its patrol and traffic officers equipped with body cameras by summer 2019. That’s a majority of its 2,000 sworn staff and those who have the most street interaction with the public. The body cameras will be used to document police interactions.
HPD made the decision in March 2017 to begin the use of body cameras, saying the department “believes transparency is critical in establishing public trust.”
The city has budgeted $2.5 million for the program in fiscal 2018, which begins July 1. That would include purchasing the equipment for all of the roughly 1,200 patrol officers, Ballard said.
Honolulu will be following many other U.S. cities by adopting the use of police body cameras.
As of 2015, 95 percent of large police departments reported they were using body cameras or had committed to doing so. Last year a major study of police body cameras in Washington, D.C., showed that officers with cameras used force and faced civilian complaints at about the same rates as officers without cameras.
The State of Hawaii Organization of Police Officers, the officers union, has stated that it supports body cams but thinks their use needs to be put into a contract.
The Hawaii Labor Relations Board determined in 2016 that the union has no say on body camera policy after concluding, in a case involving the Kauai Police Department, it is not an issue subject to negotiation.
A Honolulu pilot project involving a 30-day field-testing period ended in December. More than half of the officers who participated came from District 1’s third watch.
All three other Hawaii counties have at least begun pilot projects for body cameras. The Kauai County Police Department, the only Hawaii law enforcement agency to use them widely, has reported that complaints against officers have dropped since its policy went into place in December 2015.
On Oahu, officers in the District 6 Waikiki and District 7 East Honolulu patrol districts will start wearing body cameras by the end of the year, Ballard told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Those districts were chosen because their command posts are located within the main Beretania Street station, making the controlling of logistics easier, Ballard said.
“Depending on how it goes, we could roll it out faster (to the other districts),” the chief said.
Maj. Craig Uehira, head of the HPD Finance Division, said total implementation will cost about $7 million over five years, including the cost of storing and managing the data collected from the cameras.
At full implementation the program would cost about $2 million annually to maintain, Ballard said.
The Honolulu body camera policy is available on HPD’s website at 808ne.ws/HPDbodycams.
The New York Times contributed to this report.
