Bodycams on Halifax Regional Police 2025 wish list

On Wednesday, Dec 18, Halifax’s Board of Police Commissioners held their final meeting of 2024. On the agenda was Halifax Regional Police’s proposal for the coming 2025-26’s budget. The $101.2 million in proposed spending is a 3.3% increase from last year’s police budget, and would be roughly 10% of Halifax’s entire municipal budget. This fiscal year’s big-ticket items include $462,300 for seven new civilian positions and $828,000 for body-worn cameras. This $828,000 would jump to $3.36 million next fiscal year.

Halifax has been looking to implement body-worn police cameras since 2020. In 2021, the police board got a report from the HRP that said, “there appears to be broad majority support for the deployment of BWV”—body-worn video—“as a tool to improve police accountability and improve police-community relationships.” The report also found that “the success of body-worn cameras in improving police outcomes, accountability, and relationships with the public is heavily dependent on the implementation context.” To translate jargon to English, cameras can only capture images if they are on, and those images are only useful if they can be used. Successful use of bodycams usually requires a strong regulatory framework to ensure both outcomes.

Thanks to George Orwell’s 1984 being required reading in many public school curricula, most people have a vague understanding of how constant state surveillance can negatively impact citizens. In the Ontario Privacy Commission’s 2021 report about Toronto police’s body-worn cameras, they write “it is critical that a governance framework supports the implementation of a BWC program in a manner that respects individuals’ reasonable expectation of privacy whether in private dwellings or in public places.” The report makes note of the Supreme Court of Canada “repeatedly” recognizing that “members of the public have a reasonable, if diminished, expectation of privacy in public spaces.” Because there are some very real privacy concerns for the public when the police start recording and storing a massive, searchable digital archive of recordings of public spaces. Especially when considering the creepy ways digital archives can be used with the right type of software. The same type of software the HRP has already been caught lying about using.

For their part, the Board of Police Commissioners hesitated to allow spending on body-worn cameras until there was a policy framework in place, and they are now satisfied by the HRP’s policies. The police also told the board that updating their digital evidence management computers is how they will manage the massive amount of digital records produced by the new cameras, while alleviating public privacy concerns. Despite any personal misgivings you might have about bodycams, inconclusive research into their public-safety benefits or past HRP deception around surveillance tech, this computer upgrade the HRP needs to be able to use the cameras makes bodycams worth it for Halifax and its regional police.

Even as lots of people and businesses have kept up with technology, many public institutions are woefully behind the times. For example, how many USB drives do you think it takes for the HRP to submit evidence to the Crown prosecutor’s office in this age of encrypted email? Did you guess zero like a normal person with reasonable expectations from your public institutions? If so, you would be incorrect; the HRP’s current digital evidence chain of custody process requires a shocking amount of physical media storage and supporting administrative work, which is incredibly cumbersome for both HRP and Crown attorneys. The computer upgrade required for bodycams will allow the HRP to modernize how they handle digital evidence. This will let police stop wasting time doing file transfers to USB drives before putting them in the physical mail, and they will now be able to spend that time doing police work. This in turn, means more police work for the same amount of police spending. Is the clear benefit of more efficient and responsible police spending around electronic evidence worth the potential privacy risks of bodycams?

You’ll have your chance to weigh in on this question at the Wednesday, Jan 8 Board of Police Commissioners meeting, where the board will receive public input on issues like body-worn cameras and police tanks. This is a virtual meeting, so if you want to speak at it you need to contact the clerks and sign up by Tuesday, Jan 7.

However, no matter what the public says to the board, it is extremely unlikely that the HRP will not end up with bodycams. The RCMP has already started rolling them out in the HRM, and it would be a bit weird if residents policed by the RCMP were subject to extra surveillance while people policed by the HRP were not. But that’s another debate about whether or not integrating the HRP into the RCMP is just ceding control of Halifax’s police forces to the federal government. And the integration debate will reappear on Monday, Jan 6 at 1pm as the RCMP presents their budget requests to the board. Are their requests for new officers aligned with the HRM’s ongoing police reform efforts? If they’re not aligned, what power does the board or local RCMP brass have to change the asks? Answers to these or any other questions that come up will be found in The Coast’s coverage of the Jan 6 Board of Police Commissioners meeting.