In the wake of the death of George Floyd, there’s been a growing demand that police officers wear body cameras and a Kamloops business leader and former officer says it’s not as cut and dry as people may think.
Kamloops Central Business Improvement Association, Executive Director, Carl DeSantis spent 30 years with the Calgary Police Service and while on the NL Morning News, said he thinks body cams are a good idea overall.
“I’m a fan of recording interactions with the police and the public,” he said. “This is really much in line with our conversations about having security cams downtown.”
“It’s not going to create a situation where everybody is going to go to their computer monitor. The command staff, they’re not going to be watching to see what’s going on. It’s just in case there’s an altercation, just in case there’s a complaint, just in case there needs to be a review of a police officer’s actions, whether it’s for evidence or internal administrative reviews, so I’m a fan.”
While DeSantis agrees with the idea, he says body cameras aren’t the be-all and end-all to the problem.
“There’s a challenge there and it’s called technology and technology, as we know and boy in the last couple of months I’ve found over and over and over again with some of these meetings that I’ve been at, technology doesn’t always work when it should work,” DeSantis added.
“So, we can’t put everything, you know all of our marbles in one basket and rely on the technology side.”
He also says there are a lot of different issues when it comes to body cameras.
“There’s also a retention schedule. You’re going to need significant computer space to store all of the recordings and for how long?” he noted. “So it’s not as simple let’s stick a camera on their uniform and we’ll the solve the worldly issues. It’s not that simple.”
As far as calls to defund the police, DeSantis says he isn’t fond of the term, but he notes departments should be held accountable for their budgets and if necessary, the budgets should be reviewed or reallocated.