SF Police Commission OKs body cameras

The San Francisco Police Commission approved a body-worn camera policy for police officers, bringing the city force one step closer to rolling out the devices amid heightened scrutiny and calls for transparency.

The vote late Wednesday ended more than a year of negotiation and debate, and means officers may be recording their interactions on the streets within a few months, just as their counterparts do in Oakland and many other Bay Area cities.

But the approval also drew controversy over one of the more contentious issues in the national discussion on police accountability: whether officers who wear cameras should be allowed to view their footage before filing reports on critical incidents such as police shootings.

The policy that passed with a 5-2 vote will allow officers involved in shootings to view footage only after they provide an initial statement of facts, with a fuller statement coming later. It was a compromise made by the officers’ union, the Police Officers Association, after months of negotiations and meetings that were held under department policy.

Several commissioners said that after the events of recent months — including controversial police shootings, the emergence of racist text messages exchanged between city officers, and the May 19 resignation of Chief Greg Suhr — the department needs to deploy body cameras as soon as possible to rebuild trust.

But Commissioners Petra DeJesus and Victor Hwang, the two holdouts on the vote, said the policy — and the compromise on the issue of officers viewing footage — veered from what the community called for and was too vague to be effective.

“This is a travesty,” DeJesus said.

Officer Frank Bonifacio demonstrates a LE3 model of the Vievu body camera that patrol officers are now wearing, at OPD headquarters in Oakland, CA Wednesday, August 19, 2015. Officer Frank Bonifacio demonstrates a LE3 model of the Vievu body camera that patrol officers are now wearing, at OPD headquarters in Oakland, CA Wednesday, August 19, 2015. Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close SF Police Commission OKs body cameras 1 / 7 Back to Gallery

Union President Martin Halloran had said Tuesday that he believed the compromise on the policy was what the Police Department’s biggest critics wanted.

Under the policy, an officer must provide an initial statement to investigators, including a brief summary o f the officer ’s actions as well as answers to what prompted the officer to use force and what other actions the officer took to mitigate the alleged threat.

The officer will be allowed to watch any body-camera videos of the incident before a more lengthy interview with investigators.

Police watchdogs and civil rights activists have long argued that officers should not be allowed to watch body-worn camera footage at all, saying viewing video could sway their statements, limiting the power of the cameras to increase accountability.

Police advocates like Halloran, though, had argued that stressful situations can affect memory and that not allowing officers to view footage set them up for “gotcha” moments.

In December, the Police Commission voted on a policy that would have allowed officers to view videos at the discretion of the chief, sending that proposal to the police union for negotiation. The union voted Tuesday to instead pass the compromise.

Acting Chief Toney Chaplin, attending his first Police Commission meeting since succeeding Suhr, called the policy put forth by the union a “huge concession” and said it represented the best course to get the devices put into use.

“My concern as chief is, we need these cameras,” Chaplin said. “We need to be able to get that and I think that affords us the best opportunity.”

Several commissioners supported Chaplin’s stance, with Commissioner Sonia Melara saying it would be possible to revisit the policy should any issues come up.

“My concern at this point is to get the cameras on the streets,” she said.

Mayor Ed Lee announced in May 2015 that he was setting aside more than $3 million in the city budget to equip 1,800 officers with body cameras. At that time, Police Commission President Suzy Loftus said the devices could not be rolled out without proper policies, and convened a working group composed of stakeholders such as the police union, the public defender’s office, the San Francisco Bar Association and alliances within the police force.

Alan Schlosser, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, said Wednesday that the compromise was not what his organization wanted.

“When we said there should be an initial report, we didn’t mean there should be a brief report,” he said. “We meant there would be a full report and then the officer would see the video and then there would be a supplemental report, with the understanding that recollections change.”

DeJesus and Hwang argued that without more clearly defined criteria over what an “initial statement” entails, the policy could allow officers to hold back in their first interview and then watch the video, which could skew their memory of the incident.

They and several members of the public said the decision on the camera policy made them worry about the Police Commission’s other significant project: an overhaul of the Police Department’s use-of-force policy. In coming up with a new draft, the commission has followed a process similar to that used to develop the camera policy.

“It makes me discouraged in starting the use-of-force discussion,” Hwang said. “We spent all that time in community meetings and public input and put all this time into it and the POA gets to change it at last minute.”

With the commission’s approval of a policy, officials said, San Francisco police officers could be wearing cameras as early as Aug. 1.

Vivian Ho is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: vho@sfchronicle.com Twitter: VivianHo