RHON­DOR DOWLAT 

Se­nior Re­porter 

rhon­dor.dowlat@guardian.co.tt 

Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice So­cial and Wel­fare As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent, ASP Gideon Dick­son, has reaf­firmed the as­so­ci­a­tion’s com­mit­ment to the use of body-worn cam­eras by of­fi­cers, de­scrib­ing the tech­nol­o­gy as “es­sen­tial” for mod­ern polic­ing. 

“We have gone on record in­di­cat­ing that we want all our of­fi­cers to utilise the body-worn cam­eras pro­vid­ed to en­gage in pa­trols and in­quiries,” Dick­son said yes­ter­day, un­der­scor­ing that the cam­eras are cru­cial for “ac­count­abil­i­ty” and “trans­paren­cy” in law en­force­ment.

Speak­ing dur­ing a tele­phone in­ter­view, Dick­son ad­dressed past con­cerns about the im­ple­men­ta­tion of body cam­eras, clar­i­fy­ing that any hes­i­ta­tion was due to prac­ti­cal is­sues rather than op­po­si­tion from of­fi­cers to its use. 

“I think that I was mis­in­ter­pret­ed in the past,” he ex­plained, not­ing that his pre­vi­ous com­ments were about the need for prop­er train­ing.

“If you are in­tro­duc­ing some­thing new in­to law en­force­ment, there ought to be a lev­el of train­ing that goes with it.”

One sig­nif­i­cant prob­lem that al­leged­ly emerged was the fail­ure to en­sure footage cap­tured by the cam­eras could be down­loaded in­to a TTPS data­base.

“We have in­for­ma­tion, which I’m yet to val­i­date, but I know it has come from a cred­i­ble source, that one of the prob­lems which ex­ist­ed with our body-worn cam­eras in the past is the fact that the per­son re­spon­si­ble for IT did not pur­chase the dock­ing set,” Dick­son said. 

He said this over­sight meant that of­fi­cers might have been op­er­at­ing un­der the as­sump­tion that their cam­eras were ful­ly func­tion­al when, in fact, they would not have been able to ac­cess footage af­ter record­ing it.

“You might be go­ing out there think­ing that you have a cam­era in full op­er­a­tional mode, and noth­ing is hap­pen­ing be­cause you can’t re­al­ly get the footage sub­se­quent­ly,” he added.

De­spite these chal­lenges, Dick­son ex­pressed op­ti­mism about the in­creas­ing use of body-worn cam­eras with­in the TTPS. 

“There has been an uptick in terms of the us­age of the body-worn cam­eras that are in cir­cu­la­tion by the of­fi­cers, and that is an en­cour­ag­ing sign for us as an or­gan­i­sa­tion,” he not­ed. 

Cur­rent­ly, he said the TTPS has “ap­prox­i­mate­ly 745 cam­eras” in ac­tive use for op­er­a­tions, with an ad­di­tion­al 200 be­ing used for train­ing pur­pos­es.
How­ev­er, he said the TTPS is work­ing to ex­pand body cam­eras sig­nif­i­cant­ly.

“The or­gan­i­sa­tion would have gone through the pro­cure­ment process to ac­quire 2,000 cam­eras,” Dick­son re­vealed, with “1,000 ex­pect­ed at the end of Oc­to­ber” and the re­main­ing units an­tic­i­pat­ed by March next year.

He re­as­sured the pub­lic that the TTPS re­mains com­mit­ted to “keep­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go safe,” stat­ing, “We have not giv­en up on the bat­tle. We have not lost the bat­tle. It is a work in progress.”