New policy and new tech rolled out for reviewing Aurora police body cam videos
Every day, every officer in the Aurora Police Department is required to start their day picking up and dropping off their body cameras.
"They are always on, they are always recording; they are going to show the good, the bad and the ugly," Lt. DJ Tisdale said.
Tisdale says after docking their cameras, every video from every interaction is stored in a cloud.
With no requirement in place, those videos may or may not be screened.
"Videos initially were just anything, so a supervisor would go and do an audit, they would pull a random video, they would watch it, give critiques to the officers for training, for things they can do better, but again, it was just random," he said.
The program they use to store those videos from defense tech company Axon Enterprise provides live transcribing, a flagging system for when an officer pulls his weapon and when they turn on their lights and sirens. It's had those features for years. In January, an upgrade was made available to that system that now allows the use of keywords to prioritize which videos should be watched.
The more keywords or actions flagged, the higher the video is ranked for viewing.
"It looks for keywords out of two places, so the first place is provided by Axon, and that's called hatebase.org and it's just a global database of hate speech," Tisdale said. "So it looks for those keywords. It also looks for keywords that we as an agency put in that we want to or may want to look closer at. Things like 'stop,' 'show me your hands,' 'stop resisting,' 'police,'" he said.
After a number of excessive force cases, the department is now operating under a consent decree and has five years to reform policy addressing everything from bias policing, use of force, recruitment and hiring and accountability and transparency.
"The consent decree is formulated around the concept that that process of continuous improvement is exactly what needs to happen, and we have a tremendous tool by which to accomplish that, and that is body-worn camera video," Jeff Schlanger said.
Schlanger is the independent consent decree monitor for the city of Aurora. He says part of their work includes instituting new policy that requires a certain number of videos be reviewed.
"So the initial standard is going to be that a sergeant must view three videos from each of his or her officers and that then will be reviewed by a lieutenant every quarter," he said.
Screening a mix of videos, those with identified keywords and some at random, he says, is the ideal method to identify both concerning behavior but also highlight best practices.
Tisdale agrees the technology is about more than discipline.
"I think this shows just how much APD is committed to working to show our transparency and to improve our selves as an agency and help our officers do the best, they can serving the community," he said.
The technology to prioritize the videos using keywords is relatively new and the Aurora Police Department one of the first to put it to use in Colorado.
