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2015-2016 San Mateo County Civil Grand Jury 13 <br />The Menlo Park Chief of Police appointed a Citizens Advisory Committee to review and <br />comment on proposed policies and procedures for use of body-worn cameras that met the <br />department's needs but did not infringe on citizens’ civil rights. This committee included an <br />individual active in both the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, two organizations <br />active in protecting citizens’ privacy and civil rights.28 The committee recommended acceptance <br />of the Menlo Park policy. (See Appendix E for Body-Worn Camera Policy—Menlo Park Police <br />Department and Appendix F for Body Cameras—Menlo Park Police Department Citizens <br />Advisory Committee Report.) <br />According to the ACLU, "the challenge of on-officer cameras is the tension between their <br />potential to invade privacy and their strong benefit in promoting police accountability. Overall, <br />we think they can be a win-win but only if they are deployed within a framework of strong <br />policies to ensure they protect the public without becoming yet another system for routine <br />surveillance of the public, and maintain public confidence in the integrity of those privacy <br />protections. Without such a framework, their accountability benefits would not exceed their <br />privacy risks."29 <br />The Grand Jury acknowledges that further developments are likely, such as new statutes and <br />court decisions interpreting existing privacy and other civil rights laws related to the use of <br />body-worn cameras in the coming years. However, this process is not uncommon in the field <br />of law enforcement generally and there was no indication to the Grand Jury that the evolution <br />of policies regarding body-worn cameras cannot be effectively managed by the local law <br />enforcement community. Further, the Grand Jury suggests that policies such as those developed <br />by Atherton, Belmont, Foster City, Hillsborough, and Menlo Park can serve as templates for <br />other law enforcement agencies. <br />Chain of Custody Concerns <br />Local police policies and the inherent design of the body-worn camera hardware and software <br />severely limit officers’ access to body-camera footage so as to protect the chain of custody for <br />its potential use in future legal proceedings. For example, officers have no capability to edit <br />the video except to tag a segment with a case number or an arrest report number, or to assign <br />a criticality status to it. Once the video has been stored, access is typically limited to a select <br />few senior command personnel who are assigned special access codes. An electronic trail is <br />created that tracks who, when, and what was done. Exceptions are typically only allowed <br />when pre-determined non-critical data is scheduled to be purged from system storage after <br />reaching the retention period defined in the department's policies. However, video data that <br />involves legal proceedings, citizen complaints, or which is otherwise retained upon request are <br />often stored indefinitely. <br /> <br />The district attorney's office, defense attorneys, and other law enforcement and criminal <br />justice agencies often request copies, which are provided on a separate medium such <br />as a CD-ROM. <br /> <br />28 Officials from the Menlo Park Police Department: interview by the Grand Jury. <br />http://www.menlopark.org/DocumentCenter/View/7240. <br />29 Jay Stanley, Police Body-Mounted Cameras: With Right Policies in Place, a Win for All v.2, American Civil <br />Liberties Union, March 2015. https://www.aclu.org/police-body-mounted-cameras-right-policies-place-win-all. <br />6.1.J. - Page 18