Body cameras are swell — but put one on the mayor, too

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But Rialto also has 54 uniformed officers. Miami-Dade has somewhere around 1,500, according to PBA President John Rivera, who has some seemingly legitimate concerns about the cameras — and not just a knee-jerk reaction because there is still no contract agreement in sight and he doesn’t believe or hates anything that comes out the mayor’s mouth.

First off, it’s 500 body cameras budgeted this year. But we have 1,500 cops on the street. How will we pick and choose which officers get the cameras? Ladra hopes midnight shift gets first dibs.

He also has questions about the peripheral vision of body cameras and whether or not they will be equipped with special night vision capacity. “Our officers don’t have infra red vision,” Rivera said. “It has to be a fair comparison to what they see with the naked eye.”

Rivera also said that the mayor has not discussed the real cost of the cameras. In addition to the $500,000 wanted by Taser International — the big dog on the national scale making tons of money providing this service — to run and maintain the camera program, the county’s police department will need to assign its own people to train officers in the use of the cameras, to review the tapes, to catalog them, to store them.

And the mayor said he wants to use the body cameras as an even more effective law enforcement tool in the future, with facial recognition software to get information on the subject to the officer in real time. That sounds expensive.

And what happens when an officer “forgets” to turn his camera on? Or, worse, forgets to turn the camera off before he goes into the little boy’s room at Dunkin Donuts? What happens if there are other people (read: innocent folk) besides the subject caught on camera, including minors? There needs to be a lot of standard procedure stuff written here. A lot of questions still need answers.

But, while there does need to be policy and training and more study on the total eventual costs, Ladra is already all in.

Not just because there are so many people with cellphone cameras now and police altercations are already being recorded — just not by the police. Which is a good thing. Check out the awesome work being done by blogger Carlos Miller and the other good folks at photographyisnotacrime.com, where the motto is “be the media.”

Nah. It is mostly because another perk not mentioned is that politicos who might try to weasel themselves out of a ticket — ala Miami Commissioner Frank Carollo in his now famous Coconut Grove incident — would instead have to smile for the camera with the knowledge that bloggers like me and Al Crespo are gonna be all over that. That extends to the, ahem, children of electeds who get caught buying drugs in daddy’s car. Allegedly.

Oh, yeah, the recordings have to be a public record, right Al? The mayor can’t decide what gets out and what doesn’t t out. In fact, might Ladra suggest a live feed on the county website to help fund the boy cam program. I’d pay per view. You might even make it into a revenue stream on YouTube with the really good ones.

And why stop at cops?

We should order 14 more body cameras — for Gimenez and the other 13 county commissioners. Besides the “what’s good for the goose” thing and setting an example — which the mayor says he loves to do — Ladra bets that they will just be more entertaining. Their inside deals and meetings with lobbyists are certainly something that the public has an vested interest in seeing, as well. In fact, the mayors of all municipalities should wear body cameras, as well.

And maybe, like the mayor inferred would happen with cops, bad politicians would think twice before, say, taking $3,000 from a lobbyist in a closet.

In fact, Ladra is willing to bet we get more action on those cameras.

I want to hear the conversation (or I can read lips) when lobbyist Jorge Luis Lopez — who we assume picked up the tab — sat at a table at Joe’s Stone Crabs not only with his BFF Gimenez but also with Miami-Dade Aviation Department Director Emilio Gonzalez and whoever those two other guys are at the end of the table that Ladra can’t really see, let alone recognize.

“There is no expectation of privacy when you’re outside the house,” the mayor said on The Gray Zone. “There is none. If you think anything you do is private if you’re outside your house, I think those days are done.”

It’s nice to finally agree with him on something.

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  body cameras, Carlos Gimenez, Miami-Dade Police, PBA