Winnipeg police board chair wants body camera pitch re-explored after 3 fatal shootings by officers
Councillor says technology would improve transparency — but research doesn't support that, expert cautions
The chair of Winnipeg's police board is pushing the city to reconsider giving officers body-worn cameras in the wake of three fatal police shootings over roughly the past month.
"This is a measure of transparency and accountability," said Markus Chambers, who is also councillor for south Winnipeg's St. Norbert-Seine River ward.
"But we have to look and see what the problem is that we're trying to resolve, and reverse engineering it to see if body-worn cameras is actually the tool that will assist."
Winnipeg police shot and killed three people in 2023 — all in the final few weeks of the year. The latest involved a 19-year-old international student who was shot by police last Sunday.
The deaths also include a 52-year-old man killed on Dec. 28 and a 39-year-old man shot on Nov. 28.
Chambers said the city has estimated it would cost about $6.8 million to purchase body-camera technology and another $4 million to $5 million annually for the full-time positions required to monitor the program.
That would be on top of the "terabytes and terabytes" of space needed to store the footage, he said.
"It is an expensive program. So we have to be very careful in terms of how those dollars are spent and whether it's the best investment," Chambers said, adding any assistance from the province "will go a long way."
Police Chief Danny Smyth echoed some of those sentiments at a news conference on Thursday, where he defended how officers respond to mental health calls following an incident a day earlier, where a man was taken into custody after police shot him with a foam round and a stun gun.
"It's a costly thing, no question about it. It's not a panacea to stop any of this necessarily, but … it is a way for us to be more transparent and accountable for interaction that occurs daily," Smyth said, adding he thinks most police forces in Canada will get the technology eventually.
In 2021, city council rejected a proposal to increase the Winnipeg Police Service budget to buy the cameras — which meant if the service wanted them, it had to find the money within its existing budget.
Chambers said he's meeting with Manitoba Justice Minister Matt Wiebe later this month to discuss the latest proposal, which he said would ideally begin as a pilot project before being fully rolled out.
An emailed statement attributed to Wiebe said while the province won't cover the cost of the cameras, "discussions with law enforcement and municipalities about these and other measures to keep Manitobans safe are ongoing."
Research doesn't support cameras: expert
While "people desperately want to believe that the cameras are going to reform policing," the evidence just isn't there, said Christopher Schneider, a sociology professor at Brandon University who has done research on police body-worn cameras.
"Right now, everything's operating off of assumptions. And we all know the expression, you know, that comes along with assumptions," he said.
He said studies on the cameras have been inconclusive and often "puzzled researchers," showing at times both that they reduce and increase police use of force.
In other cases, studies have found no statistical difference in behaviour, whether cameras are worn or not.
"So we're going to presumably be spending millions of dollars on these devices. And then the basic question becomes, you know, 'What is the benefit here for the taxpayers?'" Schneider said.
"One thing we could say definitively is that it will drastically increase the police budget."
He said that's on top of the fact that body-worn camera footage from police in other jurisdictions often isn't released at all or has been edited before it's shown to the public.
There's also "the very fact that body-worn cameras can have an on-and-off switch," he said.
Schneider said "the only real hope" for body cameras, if Winnipeg police do end up using them, would be if members of the public were invited to help write the policy on how they're used — something he doesn't expect would actually happen.
Another option to improve accountability among officers would be to require police to carry personal liability insurance, which would mean officers who are found to have engaged in misconduct or used excessive force would see their premiums increase, he said.
Police board chair Chambers said while he wants to see body-worn cameras explored for officers in Winnipeg, there are other solutions that also need to be considered to address the root causes of crime — including mental health and addictions support, and investments in youth programming.
"It's not just one tool — it's a variety of different initiatives that should be considered to reduce the trend of rising crime that we're seeing," Chambers said.
With files from Brittany Greenslade and Chidi Ekuma