Washington County : Sheriff: Deputy didn’t break rule in quieting audio
Posted on Saturday, April 15, 2006
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/151844/
A Washington County deputy who shut off his in-car audio recording system after a state trooper shot a mentally handicapped Springdale man March 7 didn’t violate any sheriff’s office policies. That likely won’t be true, however, if a deputy does the same thing in the future.
Deputy Jeremy Harrison was among the six officers on the scene when Arkansas State Police Trooper Larry Norman fatally shot Joseph Erin Hamley. Harrison’s recording captured the moments surrounding the shooting, but the audio was turned off in the aftermath.
“We didn’t have a policy that said you can’t do that,” Sheriff Tim Helder said Friday. “But common sense, especially in light of this incident, says don’t do it.”
The police audio and video recordings were part of the evidence reviewed the last two weeks by a special grand jury in Benton County. The grand jury handed up an indictment Thursday charging Norman, 40, of West Fork with a misdemeanor count of negligent homicide. The charge is a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a $ 1, 000 fine.
Even before the Hamley shooting, sheriff’s office personnel were registered for policy training about the appropriate use of video and audio capabilities. Policy drafts are expected to be finalized in a few weeks that would include requirements to continue recording most incidents until they are over.
The grand jury report called it “disturbing” that Norman wasn’t wearing the microphone for his in-car recording system and that microphones were turned off by “both Washington County deputies and Trooper Wilson Short, thereby preventing the recording of all conversations after the shooting occurred.”
Hamley, a 21-year-old mentally handicapped man who had cerebral palsy, was targeted because authorities believed that he was a Michigan fugitive, police have said.
The fugitive, who had eluded authorities in Northwest Arkansas for two days, later was shot and arrested by Springdale police.
Helder said Friday that only one of his deputies turned off his recording system after the shooting. Sheriff ’s Maj. Rick Hoyt said four deputies were on the scene, and three patrol units had recording equipment.
One deputy recorded video and audio throughout the incident and its aftermath, but a third deputy never had his microphone on because its batteries were not charged.
The grand jury’s reference to “both” deputies turning off the equipment is inaccurate, Hoyt said.
Deputies carry remote devices that can activate or deactivate the audio portions of recordings when they are away from their patrol units. Video can only be shut down from inside the cars. Recording begins when a deputy uses his blue lights or siren, when his unit exceeds 85 mph, when the patrol unit crashes, or when the deputy manually activates it. Harrison, who is also an EMT, gave aid to Hamley after he was shot, Hoyt said. Minutes later, when he went to Short’s car, Harrison turned off his microphone for a minute and half. He turned it back on for several minutes before finally deactivating it for good. The video portion of his unit continued
1 recording for 7 / 2 minutes before it was turned off, but it showed a limited view of the scene.
Harrison told Helder that he turned off his audio when Norman was talking on a cell phone to his wife and felt it was inappropriate for the agency’s recording equipment to capture that conversation.
“It didn’t look good, regardless,” Helder said. “Your deputy or officer who’s out there may be trying to do the right thing, but it doesn’t matter, because at that point it becomes a perception thing.”
Recording devices in patrol cars serve multiple purposes. The images or audio can later be reviewed if a complaint is filed against a deputy, for example, or the information can be used in the prosecution of someone charged with a crime.
The audio portion of a deputy’s shooting of a Prairie Grove man just days before Hamley’s shooting provided evidence that helped prosecutors charge the man with assault.
The sheriff’s office’s digital recording equipment constantly records, but routinely only keeps information from the preceding 30 seconds. When the device is fully activated, it preserves that 30 seconds, then continues recording until turned off. That pre-recorded interval is useful because it can capture evidence of a crime that happens before a deputy has otherwise triggered the system.
Jim Kuboviak, a prosecutor in Brazos County, Texas, and director of a private firm that trains law enforcement officers on the use of mobile video units, said Friday that there is no standard policy across the United States regarding how officers should use in-car recording systems, but one is needed.
“The more you leave the system on, the better,” Kuboviak, director of the Law Enforcement Mobile Video Institute Inc., said. “If you turn it off, somebody thinks you’ve done something wrong, even if you haven’t.”
But Kuboviak said there’s no reason officers should keep recording at all times.
The most critical recording times are when officers are in contact with a suspect or some other “contact,” he said.
“Just because they turn it off, why does that mean they did anything wrong ?” he said.
Hoyt said leaders of another training class he attended said deputies should “never, never, never” turn off their systems until an entire incident has ended.
He said his agency’s new policies may still may permit deputies to deactivate their systems for specific reasons, such as when discussions involve a confidential informant whose identity must be protected, but even then the policies will detail the proper procedures for recording the reason for a unit’s deactivation.
The draft policy would also would require that each trained deputy maintain charged batteries and spares for their individual audio recording microphones.