OIG Recommendations to Inform and Improve Storage and Labeling of Body Worn Camera Footage

Executive Summary

Pursuant to the Municipal Code of Chicago (MCC) §2-56-230(c), the Public Safety section of the Office of Inspector General (OIG) conducts reviews of individual closed disciplinary investigations conducted by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) and the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) Bureau of Internal Affairs (BIA). Based on those reviews, OIG may make recommendations to inform and improve future disciplinary investigations to ensure that they are complete, thorough, objective, and fair.

Over the course of OIG’s review of closed disciplinary investigations, programmatic inquiries, and its own investigations into allegations of police misconduct, OIG has encountered instances in which footage captured by CPD members’ body worn cameras (BWC) was mislabeled in the web-based repository in which it is stored. This mislabeling of BWC footage impacts the ability of both CPD and Chicago’s police accountability agencies to locate and retrieve all footage from an event, thereby compromising disciplinary and criminal investigations and jeopardizing the City’s ability to meet its legal and constitutional obligations to disclose information.