Every vehicle in the NYPD’s fleet of prisoner transport vans will soon be equipped with security cameras. Each of the 110 prisoner transport vans already in use will reportedly be retrofitted with security cameras in the next several months, costing the city $2,100 per vehicle, and any vans purchased in the future will already be equipped with cameras.
The NYPD is also expected to begin outfitting officers with body cameras sometime this year, although that project is currently months behind schedule.
“When something happens, to have a video record of it from the police officer’s perspective is going to help in many ways. And God forbid, when something goes wrong, we are going to have a clearer sense of what happened,” Mayor de Blasio said after the body camera pilot program was announced in 2014. After several incidents of police brutality were brought to light by third-party recordings—including the death of Eric Garner, who was fatally choked by an NYPD officer in 2014—pressure mounted for police officers to be outfitted with body cameras. There is a similar sentiment behind the push for security cameras in police transport vans, although the NYPD denies the change was inspired by any specific incident.
The Mayor’s Management Report for 2016 revealed that the city spent a staggering $228.5 million settling and paying out for judgements in police misconduct lawsuits during the last fiscal year—a figure that civil rights attorney David Rankin told Gothamist the NYPD is trying to decrease by curbing the number of police misconduct cases and softening its broken windows approach to policing.
