Urbana Civilian Police Review Board Votes to End Mandatory Taser Camera Reviews of All Taser Displays

On September 25, 2019, the Urbana Civilian Police Review Board (CPRB) met (only audio recording is made available to the public) to continue the discussion of the Urbana Police Department (UPD) Taser Utilization and Taser Policy. Specifically, UPD had decided independently without consultation with CPRB to phase out the use of Taser Cameras. In the last CPRB meeting on July 24, 2019 (article here), board members had concerns regarding the decision not continue using Taser Cams, and board member Scott Dossett called for this special meeting to look into this issue.

Said Dossett last meeting, “I made a promise to myself. I was going to be as transparent and thorough about this with the citizens of Urbana. We had 12-year olds crying in their testimony about how their City of Urbana was going to be damaged because the police would abuse Tasers. That happened in this room for hours. So, I don’t take any change to the implementation of the Tasers or the policies that we created lightly.”

However, Dossett was not present during this special meeting. Other board members – Megan McGinty, Grace Mitchell, Mikhail Lyubansky, Ricardo Diaz, Darius White, and Darrell Price were present for the quorum, with Urbana Police Department Criminal Investigation Division Commander and Deputy Chief, Richard Surles representing UPD.

CPRB Chairperson Grace Mitchell set the tone for the meeting stating, “I must say thus far the officers have done a good job with Taser usage, a couple of things I’m probably going to suggest, that we could be more involved. We don’t have to see all or so many, maybe we could randomly select videos to look at and process, randomly, so we won’t be looking at details of all videos, cause some videos we are only looking at the ground, or looking at the tree, I see that as something we don’t need to do.”

The main issue discussed was how much time Surles takes to put together the Taser reports and videos, as well as the time spent by the board reviewing the videos.

According to Surles, in the past 4 years since UPD started utilizing Tasers, there have been about 50 cases requiring Taser Utilization Reports. Out of those cases, there were 3 Taser discharges, the rest were Taser displays. In the past 2 weeks, Surles had processed 7-8 cases, spending 25-30 hours on the task.

“It is a lot, especially when I have a division to run that’s responsible for lots of important things,” says Surles.

Surles goes through the steps he takes to select pertinent footage to show the board and redact the footage, telling the board “You don’t want to hear all the back and forth about what’s going on, you just want to say, OK, he pointed the taser and it looks reasonable.”

Board member Ricardo Diaz commented that when UPD first started using Tasers, the Taser cam was the only available footage, so it was great. The good thing about the Taser cam is that the recording starts automatically when the weapon’s safety mechanism is deactivated, where as officers have to make the decision to turn on their body worn cameras. He agreed that more information is usually helpful, but stated that every piece of info comes at a cost, in this case, the cost is valuable time.

Says Diaz, “I do agree that time and investment, the resource investment, the capture, ought not to be as much, so maybe we can think through how to take that up.” He added that in the beginning, the board agreed that they wanted to review everything recorded because board members were in the process of training themselves. Moving forward though, it makes no sense to continue, since the board is already “trained” in performing reviews.

Diaz went on to say when Tasers usage was first implemented, it was the agreement that there would be no Tasers without cameras. At the time however, there were no other types of recordings.

He asked, “Is there ever a situation in which there is a Taser without a camera, does a Taser come on without a camera?”

This segued into a discussion of body worn cameras and their associated policies. Surles explained that Tasers are carried by patrol officers and all patrol officers are required to wear body cams. However, it was not possible to guarantee that there would never be a case of an officer without a camera. Surles gave an example where an officer might be in the middle of transferring footage off his camera, when he gets a call and forgets, and leaves without his camera. Surles assured the board though that “they (the officers) love the cameras, they want the cameras”.

Board members wanted to know more about UPD’s body cam policy. Surles explained that UPD’s body cam policy falls in line with the Illinois Law Enforcement Officer-Worn Body Camera Act and that officers should turn on their camera if they are doing “cop stuff”. In addition, UPD body cameras and squad car cameras are activated automatically if they are in the vicinity of their squad car and the squad car lights are turned on.

According to the Illinois Law Enforcement Officer-Worn Body Camera Act, all recordings made with an officer-worn body camera must be destroyed after 90 days unless any encounter captured on the recording has been flagged. Board members asked if this time frame could mean that footage is deleted before they are able to review it. Surles said that it was unlikely because if there was anything suspect, a complaint would probably be made and complaints need to be filed within 45 days, so a supervisor would have flagged the footage. However, there could be cases where the complaint filing countdown is frozen, for example if the subject is in jail. If 90 days have elapsed by the time the subject is released and files a complaint, the video footage would have been deleted.

The board also wanted to know how much of the body cam footage was available through the Freedom of Information Act.

“Actually, the exemptions for FOIA are pretty extensive on body cams”, says Surles. A request will be usually be denied if the requestor is not a party to the recording. City staff clarified that “For the most part, body cam videos are not FOIA-able unless there’s a complaint filed, it’s very similar to the flags – complaint filed, discharge of a firearm, use of force, arrest or detention, or bodily harm.”

Wrapping up, board members debated the best way to move forward. Chairperson Mitchell was in favor of randomly selecting 3 or 4 videos to review each time. One board member suggested just getting rid of all video from the Tasers.

Another board member was concerned that if they randomly selected videos to watch, what happens if the miss something? How would it reflect on the board with the responsibility placed by the citizens?

Surles spoke from the police department’s viewpoint, saying that from a staff allocation perspective UPD would “greatly appreciate it”, especially since he was being promoted to Deputy Chief that week and did not know how it would fit into his new workload, and if someone else could be trained to process the videos.

Surles then suggested only looking at every Taser discharge and did not want the responsibility of selecting which video CPRB should review. To date, there have been 3 Taser discharges – 2 have been reviewed by CPRB, 1 is pending. “In terms of (Taser) displays, listen to me, you’ve seen the displays they are usually kind of the same thing, um, I would say something like every 5^th video, or random number generator, or something like that. Don’t let me decide”, says Surles.

Board member Megan McGinty proposed that the board look at the Taser reports as a group and decide which ones should be further examined. But Chairperson Mitchell quickly shot down the proposal, saying “Then that puts us in a position of having to look at them all.” McGinty responded that it does not take that long to review the reports.

Surles also assured the board that if a Taser incident “goes sideways”, the board will probably hear about it through the complaint process. To date, there has not been a single complaint about Taser usage. Diaz asked to confirm that all body cam footage would be available to CPRB via the complaint process. However, it is unclear from the dialogue if this is indeed the case, as city staff chimed in to say that the body cam footage will be available if the complaint goes through the appeals process.

In conclusion, the CPRB members present at this meeting voted unanimously to approve the following motions:

1) Eliminate the mandatory Taser camera review of all displays unless there is a discharge.

2) Require a review of Taser discharges on human beings, regardless of the effect of the discharge.

The board also wanted to make sure all body cam footage related to a Taser discharge (not just the footage that Surles chooses to show) is flagged for non-erasure, even if a complaint is not made. Moving forward, Surles will review the UPD Taser policy to see if anything needs to be changed based on the two motions approved at this meeting. One or two board members will be assigned to work with him on this task.