Who is popular today?

THE CONCEPT of “malicious obedience” is when someone complies too strictly with the orders of a superior. The infamous day of “total policing” on March 23, 2015, proved members of our police force to be capable of this when ordinary roadblocks were weaponised amid salary negotiations.
Now, it would seem, the opposite is also true when it comes to orders relating to the use of body cameras. Those orders have been left largely to wither away in a netherworld of non-enforcement.
According to disclosures this month by the Police Complaints Authority (PCA), footage from body cameras is inconsistently supplied to them in the course of their investigations. In some cases, the PCA is told point-blank that officers did not turn on their cameras and therefore no footage was recorded.
Body cameras emerged as a standard operating tool of global policing practice within the last two decades. So it is remarkable that, to date, less than a third of frontline officers have access to such equipment and even fewer actually make use of it.
While former acting police commissioner Stephen Williams signed a departmental order mandating the use of such cameras for officers on patrol, it is not even clear whether officers face any repercussions for opting not to use them.
“Once there is change, there would be resistance to change,” Police Social and Welfare Association president ASP Gideon Dickson observed this week.
Mr Dickson is correct to pinpoint resistance. Time after time it is suggested that officers need to get accustomed to a culture in which body cameras are compulsory, given the degree of scrutiny into their own conduct that this equipment involves.
In 2020, Dr Wendell C Wallace, a lecturer in the Criminology and Criminal Justice Unit at the UWI, published a paper which suggested members of the association were amenable to the idea of body cameras, but with the caveat that there be a phased implementation.
About 64 per cent of those sampled believed their fellow officers would reduce their use of force if wearing such equipment. Dr Wallace also found, tellingly, that high-ranking officers were more in favour of these devices than constables and corporals.
Yet almost a decade has passed since talk of the use of these cameras by local police first arose.
Additionally, the dramatic developments of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd in the US outraged the world and underlined why body cameras are needed, have cemented the public perception that these devices should be standard.
It is ironic that police officers conduct widespread surveillance on the public, including through the CCTV network, when some of them refuse, we believe wilfully, to be held to the same standard of scrutiny.
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