Officials’ move to add body cameras to police officers and conduct enhanced trainings within the department will help hold officers accountable for inappropriate actions, policing experts said.
The University rolled out plans earlier this month to add body-worn cameras to police officers and establish a unit within the department to oversee trainings for officers throughout the year, consistent with national and regional police standards. James Tate, the chief of police who began leading the GW Police Department in January, said the department added body-worn cameras to increase trust between officers and the community.
The announcement came a month after a video appeared to show an officer pushing a Sunrise GW protester down stairs outside of University President Thomas LeBlanc’s on-campus residence while she protested the University’s investments in fossil fuels. But Tate said he began conversations about adding body-worn cameras to GWPD officers when he started on the job – before the incident occurred in February.
“Quite often, without body-worn cameras, a department and community are stuck with trying to determine who has more credibility, the officer or the community member,” he said in an email. “Body-worn cameras can significantly help police administrators determine what actually happened.”
Five of GW’s peer institutions – Syracuse, Tulane and Wake Forest universities and the universities of Miami and Pittsburgh – require their police officers to wear cameras on their uniforms, according to their respective websites.
Tate said he plans to establish a hiring board, which will include a student member, to advise police personnel on which officers to hire. He said officer hiring won’t begin until July 1, at which point GWPD will reach out to student organizations about their interest in participating on the board.
He said students bring a “unique perspective” to advising officials on officers that will inform the department on how the candidates will fit on campus.
“Sometimes they pick up on details that staff and faculty miss,” Tate said. “Students also give us a sense of how ‘approachable’ an officer might be to other students on campus, which is one of the most important considerations on a university campus.”
Tate said in the release announcing his hiring that he enjoys the sense of community he feels working with students that might be absent in a county or city police department.
Policing experts said the University’s decision to add body-worn cameras could help students feel like the officers will be held accountable for potential abuses of power and ensure that any potential abuses against officers will be documented.
Robert Jackall, an emeritus professor of sociology and public affairs at Williams College, said people often make false accusations against police officers and adding body cameras protects police officers.
“There’s no excuse whatsoever for police pushing somebody down a set of stairs,” he said. “But there are literally scores of cases where people accuse police of abuse that are simply not true.”
Jackall said the body cameras can help provide a record of contentious incidents between students and University police officers, who often share a strained relationship.
“On university campuses, there’s frequently a great deal of hostility to police and figures of authority,” Jackall said. “It’s important that their actions be responsible and that, if there are false accusations, that there is a record of it so they can defend themselves.”
Frederick Shenkman, an emeritus professor of criminology at the University of Florida, said adding body cameras to officers is a reactionary solution to pre-existing trust problems between departments and communities. He said GWPD’s decision to add body cameras depends on whether the community trusts the competence and integrity of its police department.
Shenkman said GWPD’s hiring board should focus on finding candidates who have both a college degree and extensive policing experience, which are often not requirements for police officers.
GW requires security officers to be at least 18 and have six months of experience working in either a security or customer service position, according to GWPD’s website. Special officers are required to be at least 21 and have at least one year of experience in protective services or an associate or bachelor’s degree in criminal justice or a “related field,” GWPD’s website states.
“When you say, ‘Well we’re going to have a special task force looking into the problems, and then we’ll design some training to address those issues,’ you’re still dealing with the same basic people who are undertrained, undereducated, not carefully selected,” he said.
Shenkman said police officers’ basic training, which is often a four- or five-month program and less for campus officers, doesn’t equate to the amount of power police officers hold in society.
“Individual police officers probably have more power than almost anybody else in the United States,” Shenkman said. “People don’t realize that an individual officer, without conferring with anybody else, can deprive someone of their liberty or even deprive someone of their life.”
Michael DeValve, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Bridgewater State University, said body cameras provide the community with trust that officers will be held accountable for malpractice and offer officers documentation of what exactly occurred during an incident.
“Any technology has to be seen in human terms like, how they structure it, how they craft the policy for its use and for its interpretation, what they do with a group with a file,” DeValve said.
