Interview with Segun Idowu, co-founder of Boston Police Camera Action Team

Boston Police Camera Action Team founder Seguin Idowu speaks to reporters following a City Council hearing on the group’s proposed legislation.

Segun Idowu is the co-founder of Boston Police Camera Action Team, which calls for equipping police with body cameras. Recently BPCAT presented the Boston City Council with a six-page ordinance written that detailed a proposed policy for the cameras’ use, should they be implemented.

Idowu and several friends were inspired to create BPCAT in response to the high-profile police killings of unarmed blacks. They launched the group on Meetup.com. Within days, dozens of people joined and met to develop a name, logo, and mission. They also issued a press release and began meeting with city residents. The group has 20 active members.

Idowu is a Boston native who has lived in Roxbury, Dorchester, Roslindale, Hyde Park, and now Mattapan. He graduated Boston Latin (2007) before receiving his Bachelor’s from Morehouse College (2012) and serving as a legislative aide for City Councilor Charles Yancey.

Though his family was always politically engaged, Idowu says his first immersion into social justice work was in 2011, his senior year of college, when Troy Davis was executed by the state of Georgia. As one of the MLK Jr. International Chapel Assistants, Idowu helped lead several hundred students from Morehouse and Spelman College and Clark Atlanta University to Jackson, GA to protest.

He has had personal experiences with police in Massachusetts stopping him without provocation, but says that even if he had not, he would still be moved to act.

“The fact that even one person of color continues to feel threatened and unsafe around a Boston police officer would have spurred us to continue to push for body cameras so that this feeling could be eradicated for good,” he says.

The Banner spoke with Idowu about BPCAT. Below is an edited version of the interview.

Where did the idea originate for the Boston Police Camera Action Team?

Idowu: The way it started was, of course, Mike Brown got killed on August 9th. We got with the other co-organizer of the group — we were very good friends — and we wound up venting about it. And so the idea came from the fact that we are very active on Twitter and one of the issues that people were talking about was body cameras.

We decided that after Trayvon died and Kevin Davis, Eric Garner, we always got upset but we always got stuck on ‘What do we do?’, which is where most people get stuck. There’s all these things that we want to see, but we don’t know where to start. So we decided that we wouldn’t let that pass us by again. At that time we thought that body cameras were an easy thing to try to champion, and then, of course, we found out later on that that wasn’t true. So that’s what inspired me to start with body cameras.

Why do you think is the main reason Boston needs police outfitted with body cameras?

Idowu: I think that first of all body cameras are only a start. When we began this, we didn’t think it was the solution, as the mayor and the commissioner keep saying. Until we understand it better there’s not one solution, but we thought it was one way to create more accountability and better transparency in our police department and we wanted Boston to be a model. That’s why we didn’t just want to start an organization that just demanded body cameras, but one that also participated in forming the policy in creating such a program.

And again, cameras don’t lie; they’re objective observers. As we’ve seen, even though the grand jury didn’t return the decision that we wanted for the Eric Garner case, at the end of the day, none of us would have known the name of Eric Garner if we hadn’t seen it on video. Everyone would have just gone with the story that he died of asthma or of a heart attack, and we would never have seen that he was actually choked to death. … With everything leading up to where it is, we just believe that cameras on cops would get us towards more accountability, and the idea that the justice that we so often protest and scream for would be more attainable if there were body cameras present.

Your document has specific policies to protect the privacy of crime victims, suspects, witnesses and others who may be captured on video. What inspired the ideas for those policies?

Idowu: We worked a lot with ACLU and…the Harvard Black Law School Association and it was through these partnerships that we began to take a serious look at privacy.

When we first began we thought it was an easy issue — just put the body cameras on, and that’s that. Through more research we discovered privacy was a huge, huge, huge concern. We took pains to ensure that what we finally produced would meet the criteria set forth by the big privateers in the state.

We had to think about it personally as well. If an officer walks into my house, do I want them to be recording when I’m here? Or if I’m the victim of a crime or at the scene of a crime trying to inform on someone, do I want the camera rolling all the time? It was also putting ourselves in the position of the person on the other side of the camera that caused us to look at it as a serious issue.

What did you think of the city council’s reaction when they received the proposal?

Idowu: It was very disappointing I would say. I had a little bit more faith that the city council would listen to us more than the mayor and the commissioner have been.

It‘s been pretty evident in a lot of interviews that the mayor and the commissioner gave before the hearing that they hadn’t actually read it. Every time they said, well we have concerns about privacy, we have concerns about cost, we have concerns about XYZ, a lot of us look at each other and say, ‘Wow if they had read the ordinance, it addresses those things.’ In my opinion, it’s a much healthier conversation to not say, ‘I have privacy concerns,’ but rather to say, ‘This ordinance does not address all my concerns; this is how it could be better.’ Unfortunately with the city council, it was the same thing.

It was also very frustrating because they didn’t ask me any questions. Here was the representative of the group that produced the ordinance before them, and they didn’t ask that person anything. They asked the commissioner his opinion about the ordinance he had not read. They asked the supplementary chief their opinion. And they asked the director of ACLU. There I was sitting and I could have answered a lot of their questions and they choose not to ask me to respond. So that was frustrating as well.

I was even more disappointed with the commissioner and chief because here they were saying that the people on the panel — which they’re referring to myself and Carol Rose [executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts] — were not an accurate representation of the community. As soon as the community they said they wanted to hear from got up to speak, they were up in front of cameras giving interviews about how the community was not there and how body cameras were not necessary in Boston. A lot of people were upset by that and I was as well … I just thought it was a dog and pony show. We wanted to have a real conversation about how to make our department even better, and they were not open to that conversation, which was unfortunate.

Commissioner Evans has said he cautions against moving too quickly into implementing a body-worn camera policy. How soon do you think cameras should be implemented?

Idowu: As soon as possible. Here is my thing: most major cities are doing this. The President of the United States, who has already formed a commission to study this — which is why I’m not sure why the mayor wants to form a commission to study this … Evidence is already there to show what benefits body cameras have.

I have not seen anything that shows the negative effect of body cameras and if the only negative is cost, I think that’s a bogus argument because the money is there. And at the end of the day, we’re paying so much in settlements [of police misconduct lawsuits] that I just don’t understand why we just wouldn’t go for this. If I’m repairing my house I’m not going to forgo using a hammer because I have a screwdriver and a wrench. I’m going to use all the tools available to me to do the best job that I can do and do it as quickly as possible.

We believe it [the pilot program] should be on drug and gang units and other patrol officers in every community in the city … They would also be leading the country in having the largest study on this to see what effects this really has in a major city, on the nation. We could do that or we could continue to play politics and bow down to the unions that the mayor needs to keep in control to get elected and let them dictate what we should do. But we’re not for that.

I and many members of BPCAT are from Mattapan, from Roxbury, from Dorchester and we’re just tired of being told to take things slow. We believe this will work and we need to start now and not wait — they seem to be waiting for something bad to happen. We’re not waiting for Mike Brown to be on Warren St … We want to prevent news like that.

We want it to begin as soon as possible.

Have people outside the Council been shown the ordinance? Have you had responses to the ordinance itself?

Idowu: Yes, anytime we talk about it we are presenting the ordinance. Our thing isn’t to convince people that body cameras are necessary, it’s to convince them that the policy we’ve come up with is adequate. We haven’t had anyone say that the policy we came up with is bad, or that it doesn’t address concerns. Because, again, this is a community organization and we’re from the community, and I think we have a good pulse on what folks want. I guess we were right, because no one has, to my knowledge, said it’s not adequate or not a good beginning. We direct everyone to our website where the policy is. We have not had anyone email us or contact us to say that it is not adequate, that it didn’t meet their needs or answer their questions.

What’s next for BPCAT?

Idowu: We want to be successful so hopefully that’s what next — to get a pilot at the very least. Of course our goal is that every officer who interacts with a citizen and has the power to retain and arrest folks to be equipped with this. But we would settle for a pilot program if it were for drug and gang units.

As soon as we’re successful, we will cease to exist. We had only one goal and that was to equip all of our officers with cameras, to influence or submit the policy we wrote to update. As soon as those two things are met, we don’t have a purpose any more.

We weren’t trying to create an organization that would last for 100 years. We were like-minded community members that wanted to enact some form of change. Then if we want to stay involved and work on other issues, we can but it will not be through BPCAT because BPCAT will no longer exist. That’s what’s next hopefully.