Po­lice from var­i­ous units are ex­pect­ed to wear body cam­eras from Sep­tem­ber 1, says di­rec­tor of the Po­lice Com­plaints Au­thor­i­ty (PCA) Gillian Lucky.Lucky, who met with act­ing Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Stephen Williams yes­ter­day, said she was told 40 cam­eras were al­ready bought. She said Williams would de­ter­mine which units would use them."He (Williams) said a sys­tem was be­ing put in place for its us­age and the Po­lice Ser­vice is ac­quir­ing more cam­eras and the pro­to­cols are be­ing put in place," Lucky said at the press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day at the Wa­ter­front Com­plex, Port-of-Spain.

She said body cam­eras act­ed as an in­de­pen­dent means of de­ter­min­ing where the truth lay."The body cam­eras are high-tech and when you come out of the po­lice ve­hi­cle, as po­lice of­fi­cers are mov­ing the cam­eras are record­ing," Lucky said.She said the rea­son that par­tic­u­lar equip­ment was used by many world­wide ju­ris­dic­tions was be­cause it al­so as­sist­ed in ex­on­er­at­ing the po­lice and help­ing in mat­ters in­volv­ing po­lice im­pro­pri­ety."In ju­ris­dic­tions which have used this, what they have found is that many of the com­plaints about po­lice im­pro­pri­ety have in fact been re­duced be­cause civil­ians are aware that there is an in­de­pen­dent record­ing of the cir­cum­stances of the shoot­ing," Lucky said.

Lucky first made the rec­om­men­da­tion some two years ago.She had first sug­gest­ed the cam­eras in No­vem­ber 2012, say­ing they would pro­vide sol­id ev­i­dence if the po­lice were ac­cused of any wrong­do­ing.At the time, she was speak­ing at a town meet­ing at the Bon Air High School and had ad­dressed ques­tions of se­ri­ous po­lice mis­con­duct.