Jensen La Vende

Pres­i­dent of the Po­lice So­cial and Wel­fare As­so­ci­a­tion, In­sp Michael Seales, is again call­ing for body cam­eras for po­lice of­fi­cers.

His call comes af­ter yet an­oth­er case in which his col­leagues are un­der fire, es­pe­cial­ly on so­cial me­dia, af­ter be­ing ac­cused of killing un­armed labour­er Adelle Gilbert in San Fer­nan­do on Thurs­day.

Speak­ing at a book hand­ing-over cer­e­mo­ny from Amal­ga­mat­ed Se­cu­ri­ty Ser­vices to the Po­lice Ser­vice yes­ter­day, Seales said the en­tire in­ci­dent was not record­ed but body cam­eras could have as­sist­ed in pre­sent­ing a clear­er pic­ture to the pub­lic.

"Let me just say the feed­back should be body cam­eras are a pri­or­i­ty now. I have got­ten ex­pres­sions from the mem­ber­ship of what has been shown is just one ver­sion of the event.

"I've had the ben­e­fit of look­ing at it in its de­tail and I un­der­stand now that we need body cam­eras be­cause it would cap­ture footage from the in­cep­tion of po­lice ac­tiv­i­ties and not at the back end of po­lice ac­tiv­i­ties, which is what we saw."

Seales said it was time for the Gov­ern­ment to do what need­ed to be done to en­sure of­fi­cers were out­fit­ted with the gad­gets. He added cam­eras would al­so as­sist in train­ing new of­fi­cers in ways to dif­fuse hos­tile sit­u­a­tions and how to act un­der cer­tain stress­es of the job.

"There was some re­luc­tance ini­tial­ly (to body cam­eras) but now we are see­ing that the mem­ber­ship is run­ning to­wards it. As I said, part of the ex­pres­sion of the so­cial me­dia net­work, the mem­ber­ship has said 'You know what, it is about time for the body worn cam­eras be­cause it would have cap­tured every­thing in­stead of a he said, she said thing.'

"Be­cause not every­thing was caught in re­la­tion to the footage on­line right now in re­la­tion to the pri­vate cit­i­zen," he added.

He said the footage should not be treat­ed like a holy grail and be hid­den but made avail­able to the cit­i­zens. He said vice-pres­i­dent, In­sp Anand Rame­sar, un­der­went train­ing on body cam­eras and sug­gest­ed that like in the US, the footage be made avail­able on­line.

He said the video shared on Face­book and What­sApp af­ter Gilbert was shot was post­ed hours af­ter it was record­ed, which meant that the footage may have been al­tered. With the body cam­eras, Seales said, there would not be any room for edit­ing.

One ma­jor is­sues raised by view­ers of the video was a snip­pet of an of­fi­cer pick­ing up what ap­peared to be a spent shell as they pre­pared to re­move Gilbert.

Asked about that, Seales said the of­fi­cer might have been re­mov­ing a 25-cent piece or even jew­ellery from off the ground. He added that the in­ves­ti­ga­tion would re­veal all that took place and if any­thing il­le­gal was done or best prac­tices were not fol­lowed, then the of­fi­cer would have to an­swer for it.

He re­it­er­at­ed that it was not il­le­gal for po­lice of­fi­cers to be video­taped while do­ing their du­ty but called on the pub­lic not to get in the way of the of­fi­cers while they were record­ing as that may con­sti­tute ob­struc­tion of an of­fi­cer.