As more police departments adopt body-worn cameras, they are seeing ways to use the technology as a counterpoint to narratives about officer misconduct.
Thomas J. Wydra, the police chief of Hamden, Conn., has seen plenty of disturbing body-camera recordings depicting officers committing misconduct. Last month, he decided to throw a more uplifting video into the mix.
It showed one of his officers in a heart-pounding act of rescue. Called to a nursing home because of a troubled resident, the officer chased the man up several flights of stairs and onto a sixth-floor balcony. Just as the man hoisted a leg over the edge, the officer pulled him back to safety.
“It was like out of Hollywood, ” said Chief Wydra, who distributed the video to every news outlet he knew and posted it on Facebook and Twitter.
Law enforcement’s use of body-worn cameras has expanded around the country, largely in response to high-profile civilian deaths at the hands of officers and calls for sweeping changes and accountability.
But as more police departments have adopted the cameras, they have also begun to cannily take advantage of a tool that they once distrusted. They are releasing video clips of officers carrying out impromptu acts of heroism.
This month in Topeka, Kan., for instance, the local force made public a stunning body-camera recording showing an officer wading into a pond and rescuing a small boy from drowning.
In Norton, Ohio, back in January, two officers carried a man out of a burning car moments before it exploded, an event also captured in a body-camera recording.
And in January of last year, a video from Albuquerque showed an officer finding a crying child who had been abandoned in a parking lot hours earlier. As he picked her up and soothed her — “Hi, sweetheart, you O. K.?” — his body-worn camera continued to roll.
In promoting videos recorded on the very sort of body-worn cameras that have documented episodes of police misconduct, law enforcement officials say they are trying to use the positive images as a counterbalance. Policies on the release of police videos vary widely across the nation and remain a matter of intense debate. Critics say the practice of releasing selected recordings — but not all of them — threatens to create a falsely upbeat narrative about police conduct without full transparency.
But law enforcement officials say the positive videos accurately highlight moments that have too often been overlooked: when officers do something brave and unexpected, daring and heartwarming.
“Did I think the release of this video would help our image? Absolutely, ” Chief Wydra said. “It’s important for police chiefs to worry about their brand, worry about their image and worry about how they’ re viewed by the public.”
In Norton, a suburb of Akron, a local news outlet heard about the episode in which officers pulled a man from a burning car, and they asked the police chief for the video. The chief, John Dalessandro, emailed it to the media and waited for it to go viral.
“We wanted to show the different side of law enforcement, ” Chief Dalessandro said. “It depicts the officers as human, the human side of the badge.”
After the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, there was a nationwide push for body-worn cameras. President Barack Obama praised the cameras as a marker of trust and transparency between the public and the police. The Justice Department in 2015 awarded $23 million in grants to expand their use.
Still, many law enforcement officials resisted. In particular, rank-and-file officers and the unions that represent them argued against the extra layer of scrutiny that the technology seemed to threaten.
“There were some concerns, ” said Andrew Gant, a spokesman for the sheriff’s department in Volusia County, on Florida’s east coast. “Would a deputy be disciplined for something that was caught on camera that otherwise wouldn’ t have been?”
Currently, more than half of medium to large police departments around the country have adopted or are testing body-worn cameras, according to the Police Executive Research Forum in Washington.
Yet policies on when to release videos vary widely by state, depending on open records laws, and advocates of police transparency argue that the practice of releasing — and promoting — some videos has hidden complications.
In some states, like Kansas and North Carolina, laws have been enacted to shield body-camera videos from public consumption by exempting them from open records laws in most cases. Departments in those states are free to publicize the videos they choose, with little legal pressure to release those that reflect poorly on the police, said Chad A. Marlow, an advocacy lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.
“There’s no question that law enforcement does very important work for the public and very heroic work from time to time, ” Mr. Marlow said. “I think it is very valuable for the public to see what the police are doing on their behalf. What you don’ t want to have happen is the selective release of videos to create a false narrative about what the police are doing.”
In Kansas, a state where most such videos are protected from release by public record requirements, Kris Kramer, the Topeka police chief, decided in early May to release a recording of one of his officers, Aaron Bulmer, jumping into a pond and rescuing a child with autism who had wandered away from his father.
“Recruiting new police officers has become more challenging in light of the numerous high-profile negative stories around the country in the last few years concerning law enforcement, ” Chief Kramer said in an email. “A little good news can also help with public confidence and morale as well.”
Some police officials said they had sharpened their publicity and marketing skills with the advent of positive body-camera videos. They take long recordings and edit them down into quick, digestible clips that are more likely to be watched and shared. They post the clips on their department Facebook page and Twitter feed.
Segun Idowu, a community organizer in Boston who formed a group to lobby for the Boston Police Department to adopt body-worn cameras, worried that departments would publicize positive videos to distract from negative ones.
“It is subverting the original use of the cameras, ” he said. “I don’ t have a problem with showing positive video. But just as ready as they are to show the positive video, they ought to be ready to release the video that doesn’ t make them look good.”
Michael J. Chitwood, the sheriff of Volusia County, said he released every video he could, both negative and positive, in the hope of gaining public trust.
“I think in today’s climate, when we look at Ferguson and South Carolina, every progressive police leader would be out of their mind to say we don’ t need these things, ” he said.
