As the nation's policing agents scramble to provide street officers with body cameras, a new study released Wednesday shows that a majority of use-of-force incidents weren't captured by Denver police officers who are piloting use of the technology.

There were a host of reasons for officers failing to turn on the body worn cameras (BWCs) in violation of Denver Police Department policy. According to an independent police monitor's report, which surveyed the six months ending in December, only 26 percent of the use-of-force incidents in the studied policing district were captured on video.

Among the monitor's findings: (PDF)

"We identified several causes of this issue. First, BWCs were not assigned to supervisors or officers working off-duty during the pilot project, leaving 35 of the 80 uses of force unrecorded. Second, 45 of the incidents involved patrol officers to whom BWCs were assigned, and who were on-duty at the time they were involved in uses of force. Yet, just less than half (47 percent) of those use of force incidents were actually captured by BWCs. The remainder were not recorded either because the BWCs weren’t activated, or they weren’t used in a way that produced usable and complete footage."

Reasons for not recording included:

...the most common being that the encounters progressed or deteriorated too quickly for them to safely activate the BWC, as was reported in 11 of the 45 incidents. The second most common reason identified for lack of recording was user and/or equipment error, as was reported in five of the 45 incidents where the officers did not charge their units, could not download footage, or wore BWCs in a way that obscured the audio and/or video. In five of the 45 incidents, it is unknown if the BWC was used because the supervisor did not make any mention of it in the supervisor cover report; in one incident, the supervisor did mention that the BWC wasn’t activated but didn’t say why.

Nationwide, police agencies moving to adopt body cameras has become a new sensation as the public is seeking more accountability of officers following the August 9 shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The shooting, which was not videotaped, has prompted widespread protests and left some demanding more transparency and a technological solution. Even President Barack Obama chimed in, pledging a $75 million program to fund the devices for police departments across the US.

In June, the Denver Police Department provided 102 officers with the Axon Flex point-of-view body cams built by Taser. The officers were authorized to mount them on their lapels or sunglasses. The agency is planning on expanding the program to 800 of the department's 1,400 officers at a cost of $1.5 million. The study, however, did find that body cam footage has both exonerated or implicated officers in use-of-force complaints.

Denise Maes of the American Civil Liberties Union in Colorado said if officers are allowed to "cherry pick" what is filmed and what is not, "you're going to really erode the public trust, which is really the intent of all of this."

The police department, however, disputed the findings and said there were 53 incidents of use of force during the pilot period, with some type of footage associated with 46 of those cases.

The report, meanwhile, also concluded that the public's complaints about officers' use of force increased slightly during the six-month pilot period in the city's busy downtown area. That is in stark contrast to another highly cited study in Rialto, California. Its police department began requiring police officers to wear Taser's Axon Flex body cameras in 2012.

"Officer worn cameras reduced the rate of use-of-force incidents by 59 percent. In other words, before the cameras, the rate of use of force incidents was 2.5 times higher than with cameras," according to the department's study. The study added that the use of force by officers decreased 60 percent (PDF) and citizen complaints were down 88 percent.

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