All NYPD Officers Will Wear Body Cameras By 2020, City Says

NEW YORK, NY — All New York City police officers on patrol will be outfitted with body-worn cameras by 2020, Mayor Bill de Blasio promised on Tuesday.

De Blasio announced the timeline at a press conference with the city's largest police union, the Police Benevolent Association, along with additional details about the tentative five-year agreement between the mayor and the union. De Blasio said Tuesday that the Police Benevolent Association had agreed to drop all ongoing litigation related to body cameras, a reform proposition at which the union had previously balked. The push to outfit NYPD officers with body cameras has taken years. In 2013, when a federal judge concluded that New York officers' stop-and-frisk practices were unconstitutional, the judge also instructed the department to launch a camera pilot program in five precincts. The body camera trials took more than three years to get off the ground.

About 1,000 patrol officers are already wearing cameras as part of the pilot program. De Blasio said all patrol officers would be outfitted with cameras by the end of the 2019 calendar year. The agreement announced Tuesday only applies to members of the PBA, but de Blasio said plans for officers of a higher rank might later be determined. PBA president Patrick Lynch had previously opposed distributing cameras to officers. In 2014, he said the citizen who recorded the death of Eric Garner, a black man killed in a police chokehold on Staten Island, was "demonizing the good work of police officers."

"Rather than a long contention fight over these issues, we found common ground," de Blasio said "Being able to affirm that we were all on the same page about the rapid expansion of the use of body cameras...that was big substantive progress for this city."

De Blasio also announced a significant pay raise for the 23,000 members of the PBA, among other updates to the contract.

"We were able to put money into our members' pockets so they can focus on policing rather than paying their bills," Lynch said at the press conference on Tuesday.

The collective bargaining process has taken nearly 37 months, according to Robert Linn, the commissioner for the Office of Labor Relations. This contract is just the second voluntary agreement reached between the city and the PBA in 23 years.

Police departments around the country have increasingly turned to body cameras amid a nationwide focus on the disproportionate lethal force used against black Americans by officers, although some reform advocates have raised concerns about the impact of body-worn camera policies on citizens' privacy.

This post has been updated with additional information.

Image via Ryan Johnson on Flickr.