Vancouver mayor, councillors want body cameras for all VPD officers by 2025

On Tuesday, Vancouver’s new mayor and council will vote on a motion that would see every front-line VPD officer outfitted with a body-worn camera by the year 2025.

Coun. Lenny Zhou, with ABC Vancouver, is bringing the motion which will direct staff to begin costing out the cameras and data storage, and to return with a budget for the project by early 2024.

Body-worn cameras for Vancouver Police was an election campaign promise by Mayor Ken Sim's party that Zhou says the public supports, and he believes front-line officers will too.

“Chief Adam Palmer has advocated many, many times regarding the benefit of using the body-worn cameras,” said Zhou, who is concerned the only video the public can currently see of police interacting with suspects comes from bystanders’ cell phones.

“That’s exactly what’s important, to have a complete picture by the body-worn camera, and not the picture captured by very short clips of the incident,” he added.

Former West Vancouver Police Department chief Kash Heed agrees.

“In the day and age we are in right now, with all the interactions police have, with all the negative publicity police are garnering over any use of force – how could they not embrace something like this? Other organizations are doing it, we need to do it here in Vancouver,” said Heed.

Vancouver Police Department spokesperson, Const. Tania Visintin, says it’s something the force has looked into before.

“It’s always been a cost-prohibitive issue due to technology, data storage and what not,” she said.

As part of its first budget, the new council is also expected to fund a $200,000 pilot project on body-worn cameras for VPD officers. Visintin says a working group has been formed to look at concerns around cost and privacy.

“We are going to work with the Crown on issues around the privacy concern, and having people that aren’t criminals be on film. So there are still some kinks that need to be worked out, and that’s something that this working group will do in the pilot project,” she said.

Zhou is confident those kinks can and will be worked out.

“So many other countries have implemented this already,” Zhou said.

And he claims it’s been a huge success, pointing to a study out of California that found body-worn cameras led to an 88 per cent decrease in complaints against police officers.

“At the same time, the incidents of use of force by police deceased by 59 per cent, so this is the evidence-based approach we have been advocating for,” Zhou said.

Assuming the ABC-majority council approves the motion and the pilot project, some officers may be outfitted with body cameras in 2023. But it will likely be several years before they are standard issue with every VPD uniform.