COMPONENT: Global Banner

Accelerate 2020 BWC Training is here!

Mike Ashby-Clarke is Axon’s UK country manager. Prior to Axon, Mike was an officer in the Metropolitan Police Service (Met). In 2014 he was a sergeant in Camden, North London, where he had first-hand experience of the Met’s 10-borough trial of body-worn cameras. As the force moved to a full deployment of 22,000 Axon Body 2s in 2016, Mike assumed the role of the project’s performance and governance lead. The article calls on this unusual blend of project oversight and operational experience to explain the five key insights that Mike believes can help ensure successful body-worn camera deployments. They include:

1: The trial phase: Turn sceptics into advocates (and make cameras a mandatory accessory)

The Met’s trial of body-worn cameras, run in partnership with the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) and the College of Policing, was the world’s largest. It involved 10 boroughs, focusing on Emergency Response Teams (ERTs). Five ERTs were randomly assigned to either the treatment group, who were issued cameras (two teams), or the control group (three teams). The Met elected to run the project in an advisory capacity, recommending that officers assigned cameras wore them. But it was not mandatory. 

With any roll-out of new technology there will be advocates, sceptics and those in between. Says Mike: “We had our fair share of each. And it just so happens that one of the more vocal members of my team, who was not a fan, pivoted in his view when he saw how cameras protect officers.”

The officer was implicated in an allegation of assault. It was made against him and a colleague by a female suspect they were transporting to custody. It was so serious that, under normal circumstances, a professional standards investigation would have commenced. The officers would also have been withdrawn from duty.

However, both officers’ cameras had recorded the incident. The footage showed there was no case. The complainant was charged with wasting police time and the officers were spared the professional and personal worry associated with a standards review. “This one incident completely changed the officer’s view,” observes Mike. “As a result, everyone started to wear their cameras more often and it impressed two things on me. Firstly, that, if there are officers who are well-known figures, it’s best to try to bring them onside to help influence others. Secondly, due to the protection that cameras give officers, there’s strong merit in making it mandatory that they’re worn throughout any trial. And, ultimately, the more officers that do so, the more evidence there’ll be behind the business case.”

2: The deployment phase: Success lies in planning and benchmarking

Support for body-worn cameras in London had been building for a while ahead of their deployment. And, with public opinion, the Mayor’s Office and the Met all onside, the project team identified over 20 goals. But quickly the performance and governance team felt these needed to be refined. 

Says Mike: “As we got into the roll-out, we identified that our targets were esoteric. A good example is the business case. We set the goal that body-worn cameras should pay for themselves by reducing complaints against officers, and therefore litigation costs. Since the cameras were rolled out, complaints have fallen by 40% – a great win. But in reality, it’s hard to say how much of this is directly attributable to body-worn cameras and thus how much of a financial benefit we can claim.”

Mike’s team trimmed the project’s goals down to eight. They set a baseline measure for each one, including tracking the public’s confidence in body-worn video, ensuring that all stop and search incidents are recorded and increasing positive criminal justice outcomes and early guilty pleas. A dashboard monitored the goals. And each month Mike presented findings to borough commanders to show them how they were doing relative to peers. He says: “This is the key learning for me – it’s critical to set quantifiable goals at the outset. These can be used not only to justify spending but to encourage teams to adopt best practice.”

3: The deployment phase: Take your community with you 

Although the roll-out of body-worn cameras was broadly supported by Londoners, there were concerns about how they’d be used. What’s more, the capital had an ongoing issue, with some communities feeling that they were disproportionately targeted by stop and search. The body-worn camera team worked closely with communities to tackle both issues head-on. Partnering with the Met’s Community Monitoring Groups, officers met regularly with local community leaders. Random stop and search footage was selected to discuss whether the stop was appropriate and how the interaction was handled. Constructive feedback was fed back to officers. 

“The Met rightly receives a lot of kudos for this level of transparency,” says Mike. “And, as stop and search becomes more frequently used to arrest the rise in knife crime, I believe we’ll see less push back from communities who now have a deeper understanding of the rationale behind this. Critically, too, since we rolled out the cameras, the recording of all stop and search situations has grown from 40% to close to 100% – this is a major win for officers, people being stopped and communities. It protects the truth and ensures transparency.”

4: The deployment phase: Train the trainers – and be flexible 

While body-worn cameras are intuitive to use, the whole approach to capturing footage and managing it does require training. In the Met, delivering this across a large force was a challenge. It managed this by providing online training. Officers had to present their training certificate before they were issued with cameras. Meanwhile, ‘super users’ were trained for each station and were on hand to help colleagues. It’s also advisable to have a dedicated project team – involving officers, tech staff and data analysts.

Having officers on the team is especially important. Mike gives this example as to why: “It’s not unusual for a tech survey to suggest that the best place for camera docks is near a junction box when, actually, officers want them to hand in their parade room. Apparent nuances like this can make a big difference to the way officers engage with kit.”

It’s also recommended that the project team is retained post deployment. The main reason for this is that SaaS products like Axon Evidence are continually updated. While this brings huge value in terms of optimising investments, software improvements need to be validated and tested to ensure they are appropriate for each force. Referring to this, Mike comments: “You can’t assume that new features will just be assimilated into business as usual. So training platforms must be easy to update to ensure courses stay in step with agency protocols and the new capabilities available to officers. The obvious solution is an online training portal with updates to resources sent to all officers who need to take them.”

5: The deployment phase: Promote the roll-out 

In the public sector, budgets can be tight. This can lead to a make-do and mend approach to technology, with teams feeling they have to endure, not enjoy, equipment and systems. 

Body-worn cameras represented a major uplift in terms of kit and the project team wanted to emphasise this. All officers were sent a ‘goody bag’. This included headphones, cue cards that could be handed to the public to explain why cameras were used, and the bag itself which doubled up as a lint lens cleaner. “A 22,000 camera roll-out is a big investment,” says Mike. “We wanted the issuing of devices to feel like unboxing a new iPhone. As a result of this, officers took greater ownership of their cameras and looked after them more.” 

To learn more about the Met’s deployment of body-worn cameras, two case studies are available: 

Sharing 5,500 clips with the CPS every month 

The benefits of SaaS for digital evidence management

ARTICLE: Five Insights From the UK's Biggest Body-Worn Camera Deployment

Five Insights From the UK's Biggest Body-Worn Camera Deployment

Saturday played host to arguably the biggest game of the nascent Premier League season as heavyweights Spurs and Man City shared the spoils in an entertaining game. Predictably, the action was notable for a late Video Assistant Referee (VAR) decision that saw City’s winner chalked-off for handball. Indeed, VAR has been welcomed this season with mixed reviews. But there’s no doubt that the technology is here to stay and that its use will improve. VAR will allow the men policing matches to ensure justice is done while simultaneously prompting us to look at other areas of society such as the relationship between those that protect us – and the level of scrutiny they endure – and how new technology can help support them in ensuring the right outcome for all.

Let’s not forget, there’s a reason why referees are described as policing a match because the closest comparison is your actual Boys and Girls in Blue. Ensuring the right decisions are made demands a certain kind of mentality, one that is calm under, sometimes extreme, pressure, that is resilient, and that is unshakeable in its judgement. Oh, and a sense of humour helps too. All professional footballers agree that the best refs referee with a smile on their face. It would be barely believable if a police officer never said out loud: “You need a sense of humour to work here.”

Respect, they say, has to be earned. It takes some human being – in the heat of the action – to withstand the pressure of a 60,000-strong crowd baying for a decision a ref knows is not the right outcome. VAR’s technology, and the healthy scrutiny it brings, will prove, if ever needed, why the men in black have our respect. 

That comparison between referee and policeman becomes even more finite, when you consider that police officers’ Body Worn Video (BWV) allows scrutiny of their actions too.

Of course, VAR has been deployed in other competitions for several years and goal line technology longer – the latter preventing what became described as ‘Ghost Goals’, one of the most memorable being Luis Garcia’s for Liverpool against Chelsea in the 2005 Champions League Semi-Finals. Geoff Hurst laments the fact that, in the 1966 World Cup Final, there was no goal line technology that would have proved his second goal bounced down from the crossbar and over the line as that would have put a stop to years of moaning by the Germans. 

Would Graham Poll have given three yellows to Croatia’s Joseph Simunic in World Cup 2006 if one of his assistants had intervened much earlier down an earpiece?

If, at the time, the earpiece was the biggest groundbreaking piece of technology used by the ref then, for the police service, it was the deployment of the radio. That start of a relationship between policeman and machine would eventually reach the perfect match with the BWV and  TASER devices, and change how an officer did his or her job and, just as crucially, how they felt about doing that job.

Nick Davies spent 30 years in the force, beginning as a bobby on the beat in Cardiff (South Wales): “Towards the end of my police career in 2014 BWV came in. I could see the writing on the wall. Our working lives would alter dramatically. We were now able to show a judge, a jury, the local community what words in a statement could never say. It’s given officers more confidence and authority while they are at the coal face. When an offender sees the footage he has nowhere to go. In the old days he would argue about what I said, he said, what happened, what didn’t happen. Video evidence is irrefutable.”

That irrefutable evidence led in 2016 to a 93% reduction from the previous year in complaints against the police, according to a University of Cambridge study. Dr Barak Ariel, of the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, said: “I cannot think of any [other] single intervention in the history of policing that dramatically changed the way that officers behave, the way that suspects behave and the way they interact with each other. The cameras create an equilibrium between the account of the officer and the account of the suspect about the same event – increasing accountability on both sides.”  

Similarly West Midlands Police report that complaints have fallen by 93 percent since it deployed BWV. And more importantly the cameras are helping to deliver against a key goal with officers nearly 300 percent less likely to be injured when they wear one. This delivers a knock-on effect in reduced costs as the force does not need to pay for medical assistance or send officers to hospital to accompany injured colleagues. The cameras are also helping to reduce paperwork with footage uploaded to a new system, Axon Evidence, that enables digital files to be shared directly with the Crown Prosecution Service. The reduction in paperwork tallies with the findings of the first national pilot of BWV that concluded that time spent on paperwork had been reduced by 22.4%, which led to a 9.2% increase in officer time spent on patrol (“50 minutes of a 9-hour shift”).

Like the introduction of police radios, the use of VAR will come to be seen by communities as a staging post in the relationship between technology and, above all, its ability to secure justice.

Police officers face demanding and highly pressurised situations every shift. To see how technology is helping them protect themselves, colleagues, the public – and suspects – by safely de-escalating incidents, check out this point-of-view video

ARTICLE: Supporting Informed Decision-Making With Video

As the latest Premier League season gets underway what insight will VAR offer us in the quest to ensure fairer outcomes using technology?

Supporting Informed Decision-Making With Video

As we struggle to come to terms with this new reality, police officers are under even more pressure to keep this country safe. It’s clear that pandemic has made an already stressful job even more challenging as police forces have to enforce the lockdown and deal with a lot of the fall-out from this crisis while minimising the risk of infection. 

Damian Hughes has studied the most successful sports coaches to learn about effective leadership and write the bestselling book 'The Five Steps to a Winning Mindset - What Sport can Teach Us About Great Leadership. And while policing is very different to sport, strong leadership is needed for both. Here, he shares his insights on how leaders can guide their team to behave cohesively and foster resilience. 

We live in a time where we are bombarded with information and digital interruptions - according to some studies 37 an hour, which hamper our efforts to concentrate. The many unknowns of the current crisis also creates ambiguity, which makes it harder to focus. Hughes asks, 'How do you differentiate in the deafening noise of information and distraction? How do you get people to focus? The answer is that in a time of overload you need to keep it simple.' He explains that in times of change, great leaders ask themselves how much information the people in their team are capable of processing. True leadership is not about sending out a lot of relevant messages, but picking the most important and communicate it as simply as possible. This can often be done by delivering the Bottom Line Up Front, also referred to as BLUF, used by the most successful Hollywood writers as well as business executives. 

The heuristics we all develop for everyday life, often don't apply in times of changes. Without being able to fall back on tried and tested systems, reflection is necessary to respond to new challenges intelligently. Hughes says, 'Thinking and processing, as well as retaining information, is crucial for making intelligent decisions. This is why you need to create a space where people have the time to stop and think.' He also underlines the importance to provide an environment where people feel safe to ask questions, trusting that they will be handled sensitively.

To illustrate the importance of emotional intelligence, Hughes quotes Emmanuel Steward, the head coach of Kronk, one of the most successful US boxing gyms. He says a coach needs to 'contain [emotions] then explain'. This includes acknowledging and responding to the often difficult feelings of the people he trains. This kind of emotional intelligence is also crucial for leaders during times of stress. 'If we take those three words to heart, we can all successfully handle and thrive in the face of change', says Hughes. He draws on insights from neuroscience, explaining that stress often triggers a 'freeze, fight or flight' response, rather than activating our more rational thinking circuits. To access these, people need to feel safe, in control and valued, as feeling safe is the key to handling change. 

Abstraction can lead to ambiguity and incorrect interpretations. 'Strip language of anything that could be misconstrued,' says Hughes. He then cites a quote, which is often attributed to Albert Einstein: 'If you can't explain it simply to a six-year-old, you don't understand it well enough.'

Stories have the power to inspire, as our brains are prepared to listen to and absorb narratives more readily than fact. 'In times of change, telling stories is the most effective tool you can use,' he says. And the best way to tell them is, of course, simply. Pixar is, for example, extremely good at simple but poignant stories always following the following structure:

'Have I created time and space to stop and think?'

'Have I stripped my language of jargon to make it accessible and understandable?'

'Have I got stories to illustrate how people have navigated change?'

'If you have said, yes, I want to give you confidence that you have the skills to survive and thrive during change.'

ARTICLE: Leadership in Times of Crisis

Leadership in Times of Crisis

Kathleen O’Toole is one of the grandees of policing. Her career spanned continents and stretched from front-line officer to commissioner. She is also a member of Axon’s AI Ethics Board. Here she explains why Sir Robert Peel’s Nine Principles of Policing are as valid today as when they were formulated in 1829. 

Peel’s principles have stood the test of time and remain the foundation of modern, democratic policing. The core message of ‘policing by consent’ means that, by and large, for the police to succeed, they must earn and maintain the trust of the community. Today, perhaps more than at any other time, these principles face a serious test. New technologies, such as facial recognition and prediction modelling, have vast potential to anticipate and prevent crime. But the use of some technologies, such as facial recognition, raises dystopian concerns about surveillance. What’s more, the emergence of bias in AI (which is central to predicting crimes) that seems to mimic the way humans stereotype, is undermining the public’s confidence in these innovations. With these issues in mind, how can we find the balance between making use of these powerful technologies, while still policing with consent and getting buy-in from our communities? Kathleen recommends four disciplines that can help:

Engaging the community and building trust

Soon after my appointment as the police chief in Seattle, I asked the precinct captains how we were doing on crime, and they replied, ‘Good...we think’. In reality, they had no idea - no measurement. Within weeks, we launched SeaStat, our version of CompsStat (computer statistics program), to capture timely and accurate data to map crime. 

The data we captured went well beyond crime data and showed that we were hugely involved in our community. In fact, similar to studies of other major cities, law enforcement was only 10-15% of the work we were doing. The rest was providing service and assisting vulnerable people.  Our greatest challenges were at the intersection of public health and public safety – homelessness, addiction, conditions and mental health crises.  We were constantly under pressure to address people’s concerns about quality of life issues in their neighbourhoods. 

We also discovered that officers used force in less than 2% of cases and most of it was minimal – officers only had to use serious force in a fraction of 1% of cases. We were able to use this data to address concerns and perceptions about officers’ performance and to have more constructive conversations with the community. Showing that our day-to-day operations were very different from the police shows most people see on TV also helped to enhance trust and build better relationships.

Without timely data and reliable metrics, it’s difficult to engage communities and focus on the issues that matter to them. When it comes to building trust, and policing with consent, we can use improved data collection techniques and analysis to shine a light on police work. This helps move the tone of debate away from speculation and perception to facts that enable a better understanding of the way police work and the often unseen effort that officers put in to helping their communities, looking after the vulnerable and keeping us safe. 

One of the biggest changes I’ve seen in policing is the availability of digital tools to capture data and analyze crime, and also to understand the broader demands on the police. In Seattle, we used our operations data to establish community policing micro plans, unique strategies to address concerns in specific neighbourhoods.

Of course, we always focused on serious ‘headline’ crimes. But we also developed a grassroots approach, engaging front-line police officers and community members in the development of neighbourhood strategies. They had first-hand knowledge of the challenges they faced, and often presented the best solutions. For each neighbourhood, we distilled three to five issues to focus on. We partnered with a local university to develop quantitative and qualitative metrics to gauge results, measure community satisfaction, and inform the evolution of each micro-plan.

At the same time, we acquired and developed additional tools to build trust and enhance transparency.  Body cameras were issued to all patrol officers. Public-facing dashboards allowed the community to access timely data and reports. We even worked with Code for America and mental health service providers to develop an app to assist officers when encountering those in mental health crises. It enhanced safety for officers and vulnerable members of the community. 

The SeaStat system that we set up in Seattle helped us define priorities and reframe our discussion with communities about the work we were doing and, indeed, the work they wanted us to do. With a view to being as transparent as possible, we published maps and data online. Anyone with an interest in policing could see data and reports on crime, other calls for service, community policing micro-plans, use of force, hate crimes, mental health crisis intervention and a variety of other topics. Clearly, it’s not possible to publish all operational data. We wouldn’t undermine ongoing investigations and certainly had to be mindful of privacy issues. However, we shared as much as possible. It may not always be easy, particularly if the results are not flattering, but honesty and authentic engagement are essential to building trust. Independent surveys showed that our relationship with the community benefited significantly as a result. 

As we look forward, at a time when budgets will, no doubt, be tight and police will face ever-growing demands for service, it’s clear that robust technology tools will be essential to the delivery of effective policing. 

However, there is a ‘but’. And it’s that technology is developing at an incredibly fast pace - so fast that the capabilities available to police services could undermine important democratic principles. There are growing community concerns around privacy and data retention. License plate readers are a good example. People are not necessarily concerned that their license plates are captured by a tolling system on the highway, but they probably would want to know if police have access to data from such systems, how long that data is retained, and with whom it is shared. 

Most people are reasonable and understand that we have to strike a balance. But it is incumbent on us as law enforcers and service providers to present them with certain scenarios and potential solutions, and to ask if they are willing to sacrifice a bit of privacy for a safer neighborhood. The more we communicate, and the more transparent we are, the more the community will trust our judgment. Of course, consulting the public isn’t always a smooth process, but a bit of healthy tension is a key element of democratic governance. 

Failure to consult, in my view, is deeply problematic. If the community or their elected leaders find out that the police department has purchased technology that violates democratic principles without consultation, I believe we contravene the letter and the spirit of Peel’s ideals. We have already seen facial recognition trials become contentious and there is concern around new AI applications designed to anticipate crime but which seem to introduce human racial biases into their results. These developments, in particular, must be handled with care – and a great deal of openness. 

I have interacted over the years with lots of vendors and appreciate companies, like Axon, that engage in meaningful conversations about the impact new technologies may have. In a democracy, we all – including the manufacturers – have a responsibility and need to pull together to succeed. Or, as Peel put it, “The police are the people, and the people are the police.”

I think Axon is unique in creating an AI Ethics Board. As a manufacturer, Axon is taking responsibility and addressing the issues before their products are released.

For example, when Axon was contemplating integrating facial recognition in their cameras, they consulted us. The board consists of some incredible researchers and civil liberties experts as well as a couple of us with police experience. After a thoughtful process and some spirited discussions, we landed unanimously at the recommendation to not use this technology until it improves, because we were concerned by troubling data about misidentifications. I thought it was a bold and admirable decision of the CEO to follow our recommendation. 

It’s great to think that there is a vendor out there, who is actually taking responsibility at the front end, rather than flooding the market with products that are attractive but could have significant privacy implications. 

As a police chief, I had some really smart people on my team, but the more people we have contemplating these issues and potential risks associated with these products, the better. More companies should be thoughtful and transparent in their processes. 

Resources

Smart Devices

Cameras

Software

Industries

Accelerate / 2020

News

Five Insights From the UK's Biggest Body-Worn Camera Deployment

Supporting Informed Decision-Making With Video

Leadership in Times of Crisis

Four Ways to Put Peel's Principles Into Practice in the Digital Age