Greensboro (NC): Body-Worn Cameras
January 2014
Voiceover: Beat Intro
00:00
This is The Beat, a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing 
topics facing our nation. 
Debra McCullough
00:08 
With us today is Chief Ken Miller from Greensboro Police Department in Greensboro, North Carolina. 
He is here to discuss his department’s use of body-worn cameras, including the challenges to 
implementing a body-camera program and the benefits that body cameras can have for both police 
officers and the greater community. Chief Miller, welcome.
Chief Ken Miller
00:33
Thanks. Thanks for having me.
Debra
00:35
How have you been able to get buy-in from your officers on using body-worn cameras?
Ken
00:42
There’s a couple of key points to make, I think, regarding that question. The first is to establish a 
stakeholder group that involves the different units that are going to be using the cameras or having 
to process the video. For instance, the officers in patrol or on the street record the video. If it’s of a 
crime scene, the detectives are going to have to review that. The District Attorney or prosecutor is 
going to have to review that video footage. Potentially it’s going to have to go to the defense. 
Probably, in every state now, it’s going to have to go under discovery laws and changes to those laws. 
It’s important to have all your stakeholders involved.
Patrol officers understand their concerns well. As they’re able to address their concerns in the 
discussion process about when and where to record, it helps, I think, alleviate their concerns. They’re 
able to ask questions, give us perspective from an administrative standpoint or an administration 
standpoint. They can give us perspective that we don’t necessarily have from our vantage point in 
the organization. 
So that worked very well for us. The other thing that worked well was that we assigned an internal 
champion to the camera project to really spearhead the project. That internal champion was a field 
supervisor who really had a lot of respect throughout the organization. He himself questioned the 
value of the cameras. We brought him in, shared information with him, asked him to be on board 
with it. He jumped right on it and added a lot of credibility to our effort in rolling the cameras out and 
to the discussions. He helped us think about things that we needed to think about up in the 
administration.
Debra
02:29
Have you been able to incorporate any of the incidents captured on the cameras into scenario-based 
training, and do you think that incidents captured by cameras can be used as a training opportunity?
Ken
02:45
Actually, we haven’t had them out long enough to really roll those pieces into, but we have 
considered and contemplated that in terms of the policy. Whenever we’re wanting to use a video 
clip, we want to consult with the officer whose video it was and get their buy-in for it. We could make 
a determination, even if we disagree, to use it but we would prefer to have the officers enrolled in 
the process.
The other piece for that is that there is training for both the officers and the public, but these are not 
public records, these videos. They’re personnel records or they’re investigative records. Because of 
the way our policy is shaped, our officers are not required to run the video and record the entire time 
and duration of their duties. When they interact with somebody as a member of the public but it’s 
not an investigative action, they’re not required to record. Even if it’s a consensual, voluntary contact 
but it’s an investigative action, they’re required to record.
We began rolling out the cameras in late June. We do have some video that is of training value. We 
have not yet incorporated it into specific training programs but we’re retaining it so that we can 
incorporate it into training programs. We haven’t finished rolling out the entire department. As we 
train officers on these cameras, we are using some of these video clips for the initial training.
We anticipate that video, over time, will provide us numerous examples of officers doing exactly 
what we train and expect them to do, which is reinforcement video for the good things that we do. 
That there would be video that would show us, either from a communications, a safety, or a tactical 
approach to a situation that officers could improve and what not to do, and why certain things can 
cause problems for an officer, or an interaction—or generate a complaint, and overall to lift the 
performance of individuals and thus the organization. And also, quite frankly, to help our officers 
understand, just in general, how the value of our perspective on the video—for instance wearing it 
at eye level so that you get full perspective of an incident from an officer’s vantage point—is 
important to them and to the defense of our actions. I think there’s a lot of value from a training 
perspective and we’ve only been rolling out for two months—two and a half months.
Debra
05:27
How difficult was it to develop a policy for body-worn cameras and what elements does your policy 
incorporate? For example, does your policy address the placement of the camera, storage 
requirements of the video, routine maintenance of the equipment, or anything else?

Ken 
05:48
Actually, our policy addresses everything except what you would call routine maintenance of the 
equipment, although it does address that the officers are required to verify that the machine is 
working, that their cameras are working when they get on their shift and that if they’re aware that if 
something breaks or is damaged they’re to get a replacement during their shift. From that 
perspective, it covers about what we need for the officers to consider.
As far as developing the policy, I really think that the stakeholder group took a lot of the difficulty out 
of that, because they identified where it was important, where we should be cautious. For instance, 
with investigations, if we have a significant event—an aggravated assault, god forbid, a homicide 
scene that we respond to—and you have six or eight or ten officers responding to that scene initially, 
there’s generally a fair amount of chaos, initially. Then you move into an investigation mode, right. 
You seal off the crime scene and the scene is stable. Witnesses are isolated or taken wherever they 
need to be. Then you’ve got scene processing. If you continue to run those cameras on and on, 
we’re going to run significant storage costs for the organization and we don’t think that there’s really 
any added value to that because our crime scene unit comes in and they videotape the incident 
scene. That should be sufficient from an evidentiary perspective. We allow our officers, once the 
scene is stable, to cut the video, the body-worn video.
The other concern for that that came from the prosecutors and the detectives was the fact that, for 
every officer, if they’re recording an hour or two hours’ worth of video and you have eight, ten 
officers on the scene. Now I have to look through eight, ten hours of video and process that myself 
as a detective—the prosecutor has to process that. If I’m running even longer than that, six or eight 
hours of video because I’ve got the scene secure for that long, there’s that much more time and 
energy, and those are resource commitments. We’re conscious of both ends of that, capturing the 
important information that’s really relevant to the videos. It’s really important for us to capture the 
scene and the important things from the scene but not just drag on the video.
Debra
08:19
How did you determine which officers should wear cameras?
Ken
08:24
We looked at that from the perspective of all of our field operational personnel. We felt that where 
you have field contact is where 1) most of your complaints come from, 2) where most of your liability 
and your high-risk incidents occur, and 3) it’s where the public perceptions are of the police. It’s the 
police-community interactions that are most significant.
Debra
08:50
How has the use of body-worn cameras affected the relationship between the officers and the 
community?
Ken
08:59
I think it’s a little too early to say at this point. What I can tell you is that there was a fair amount of 
media coverage and billboard campaigns by the Police Foundation for encouraging people to support 
the campaign, and a number of interviews that both I’ve done and others within the department. 
The community and the newspapers have all come out and said that there isn’t a downside to it. I 
don’t think there’s a downside to it for any organization. 
Debra
09:29
Chief Miller, thank you so much for your time and your expertise today.
Ken
09:32
You’re welcome. Thank you.
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09:35
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09:51
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