Carlin PD | Body cameras, and the policy that is one paragraph

The only one we could check

Nevada requires every law enforcement agency to put body cameras on uniformed officers who routinely interact with the public. The same statute requires each agency to adopt a written policy, and it lists six things that policy must contain: when the camera must be switched on, that it must not be switched off mid-encounter, that general activity must not be recorded, that people’s privacy must be protected, that footage is kept at least fifteen days, and that officers face discipline for erasing it early.

Six Nevada counties into this project, we had never been able to check a single one of those policies, because no agency published one.

Carlin did. A town of about two thousand people puts its whole 33-page police manual on the city’s website, where anyone can read it.

What it says

Section 316 is titled “Body Worn Cameras”. Here it is, complete:

“Pursuant to the provisions of NRS 289.830, the Carlin Police Department provides officers and field employees with portable video and audio recorders (including those worn on the employee’s person) for use during the performance of their duties. The use of recorders are intended to enhance the mission of the Carlin Police Department by accurately capturing contacts between employees and the public and documenting evidence.”

Section 317 begins on the next line.

What it does not say

We searched the whole manual, not just that section. Across 103,945 characters:

The word “activation” does not appear. Neither does “deactivate”. Neither does the phrase “general activity”. “Privacy” appears six times, none of them about footage, the closest being a passage about motor vehicle records. There is one mention of retention and it concerns DMV information, not video. There are twenty-three references to erasure, destruction or discipline, and only one falls anywhere near recording language, which is section 316 itself.

The statute’s own term for the device, “portable event recording device”, is not in the manual at all. NRS 289.830 is cited exactly once, in the sentence quoted above.

What that does and does not mean

It means the published manual cites the law and does not contain what the law asks for.

It does not mean the department has no such rules. Carlin may hold a separate body camera policy that simply is not in the published manual, and we have not asked. That question is the obvious records request, and it is the first one on this county’s list.

And it does not mean Carlin is the problem. Carlin is the only agency that made this checkable. Five other Nevada counties’ worth of police departments and sheriff’s offices keep their policies internal, and their policies may be thorough or may be a paragraph, and nobody outside those agencies can tell.

The actual finding

NRS 289.830 creates a duty and describes its contents in detail. It does not require anybody to publish the resulting policy, and almost nobody does.

So the statute’s compliance question is, in practice, unauditable in Nevada. A resident who wants to know whether their police department’s camera policy meets state law has no way to find out short of a records request, and there is no public list of which agencies have adopted one.

The one department that opened its rulebook turned out to have a policy that does not meet the list. That is not a reason to think less of Carlin. It is a reason to wonder about everywhere else.