Regina Police Chief Evan Bray recognizes the merits of body-worn cameras, but when it comes to outfitting officers with them, he said the question is whether the cost can be justified.
“The reality is body cameras probably do as much to protect police officers as anything. Our officers, day in and day out, are going into situations where knives and guns are present,” Bray said.
“The actions of the suspect, what precipitates the officers to conduct themselves or act in the way that they do, oftentimes is also caught on the body cameras.”
This week, Regina police started an investigation into the arrest of a man that was caught on video.
The black-and-white recording shows three officers chasing a man before tackling him to the ground. A fourth officer joins to subdue the suspect, although the view becomes obstructed at that point.
The investigation will have oversight from the Public Complaints Commission.
Currently most police vehicles come with dashboard cameras, Bray said. With body-worn cameras, he said the biggest cost is not the hardware but data storage.
It would be up to the police service’s governance body, the city’s Board of Police Commissioners, to debate the need for body-worn cameras — and it’s a need Bray doesn’t seem sold on.
He said police make contact with the public hundreds of thousands of times in a year. From those incidents, they will get fewer than a hundred complaints, most of them unsubstantiated, he said.
“I think you have to do a bit of a cost-benefit analysis to understand, ‘Do we have a problem here that warrants spending millions of dollars in a direction that may be because of one or two situations?’ ” he said.