KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Roughly 18 months after the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department started distributing body cameras to officers, the city’s auditor is making recommendations to improve the program.
City Auditor Douglas Jones announced Tuesday that his office reviewed a random sampling of 98 police body-worn camera video during the audit, which you can see here.
In total, from January to August 2021, officers recorded 325,000 body cam videos.
It's a new program, after years of outcry and funding roadblocks.
Jones’ office found as part of the review that while most of the videos provided good video and sound quality, some of the videos didn’t capture the entire call for service as outlined in KCPD’s own policy.
The auditor's office issued 11 recommendations, but these are the top three issues that stood out to KSHB 41 News:
- Not recording all calls for service
- Missing video for dispatch calls
- More training needed
Of the 98 randomly-sampled body cam videos, 17 weren't recorded in entirety as required and the officers gave no explanation why they turned their camera on late or turned it off early.
Out of the 17, 11 videos ended before the call for service ended.
Policy provides some exceptions to the rule. For example, if an officer enters a house and that resident says they don't want to be recorded.
However, in the videos that ended early, no citizen requested that the officer turn the camera off.
The audit showed that 20% of the 102,569 police dispatches from July to August 2021 didn't have the corresponding body cam video from the officer called out, nor did they receive a reason why this happened.
These were critical calls, like "present danger" and "don't delay."
The audit pointed out that this "reduces the department’s transparency and could raise questions from the public as to why the dispatched officer did not record."
KCPD attributed these errors to "officers' learning curve."
The department told the auditor's office that management was considering "narrowing their policy about which calls should be recorded and that the current policy will require too much data storage."
The audit cited the Police Executive Research Forum recommends recording all calls.
The department agreed with the recommendations to address the issues, including more training and supervisor reviews.
This training would address another issue the audit called out — not storing the video properly.
From Jan. 1, to Aug. 31 2021, the audit found only five out of 51,000 videos were deleted incorrectly.
However, those five videos were use-of-force calls and they were deleted because they weren't labeled under the correct retention period.
After an officer stops recording, they are required to classify the video type in the system.
If they don't, the video is classified as "non-evidence" as a default.
Some videos were part of an ongoing investigation and could have been deleted because they were incorrectly classified as "non-evidence."
The audit found there is too much room for human error in this process, and videos should be labeled blank or as "unclassified" by default.
Auditors found that supervisors from “most divisions” were completing quarterly reviews of officer videos, but auditors said such reviews should be permanently added to departmental policy.
"This audit has helped us see some things we can revise, some things we've revised already and some things we're going to need more discussion," KCPD Deputy Chief Mike Hicks said at Tuesday's Board of Police Commissioners meeting.
Hicks said making sure they're meeting performance goals will take more staffing, which they don't have right now.
KCPD came under fire during and after the George Floyd protests in the June 2020 for not having officers equipped with body-worn cameras.
The department received a grant that month from the DeBruce Foundation to launch its program.
More information about the audit is available on the city's website.
