New York Police Department officers will begin testing two types of body camera, made by Taser and Vievu, within the next several months, Commissioner William Bratton will announce Thursday.
The NYPD will be the largest police force in the nation to use the technology. It has been championed by elected officials, community leaders and some judges as a potential remedy to tense and sometimes fatal interactions between law-enforcement officials and the people they encounter.
The NYPD's pilot program will use two cameras that are widely used by departments across the country, such as Los Angeles. The Vievu model, about the size of a pager, can we worn on the front of an officer's shirt and the Taser device can be mounted on glasses, the collar or the shoulder.
Approximately 60 officers in six precinctsone precinct in each of the city's five boroughs and one public housing districtwill begin wearing the devices by year's end, said Jessica Tisch, the NYPD's deputy commissioner for information technology.
Up to 10 volunteer officers in each precinct will wear one of the camera models, she added. The three 8-hour tours in each precincts will have at least one officer wearing a camera. The officers will provide feedback on the experience through surveys and focus groups, Ms. Tisch said.
The precincts mostly cover East Harlem in Manhattan, Mott Haven in the Bronx, East New York in Brooklyn, Jamaica in Queens and the north shore of Staten Island, where Mr. Garner died.
Police Service Area 2, a public housing precinct that covers crime-heavy Brooklyn neighborhoods such as Brownsville and East New York, is also part of the pilot.
NYPD officials are still working on a set of policy guidelines, such as when the cameras should be turned on, how long the resulting video will be stored and who has access to the storage, Ms. Tisch said. That has to be in place before the officers start using the cameras.
In "New York City...just the data storage alone is a huge challenge on this kind of scale. The confidentiality issues are a huge challenge. So, we got a lot to sort out," Mayor Bill de Blasio said at an unrelated news conference on Thursday.
The video is meant to protect both police and citizens and could be used at trials, officials said.
The program stems from an order by U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin, who in August 2013 declared the NYPD's use of stop-and-frisk unconstitutional because it disproportionately targeted minority communities. She ordered the camera pilot in the precincts with the most stops as part of that ruling.
