Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates is asking the city to fund its division that reviews body camera footage, which he says has played a key role in helping drive down the city’s crime rates.
“There’s no more important division to the success of our office than the body-worn camera [division],” he said Wednesday at a city council budget hearing.
The money for reviewing body camera footage previously came through federal COVID-19 grant funding, which is expiring at the end of this month. Bates has requested continued funding from both city and state leaders at a time when both are grappling with budget deficits.
The two-year, $1.7 million grant was allocated by the Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention and Policy, using funds from the federal American Rescue Plan Act. The money allowed the state’s attorney’s office to hire 10 people for the division. This year, Bates is asking the city to provide another $864,000, enabling his office to hire 10 permanent full-time paralegals for its body camera unit.
Bates said prior to receiving the grant, prosecutors were leaving the state’s attorney’s office because they didn’t have enough time to review video footage as part of preparing their cases. Even if the key footage for a case lasts only five minutes, the total video that needs to be reviewed could be hours long, Bates said. With the grant, other staff can take the time to help review the footage.
“Now instead of that prosecutor spending those five hours on reviewing body camera footage, they now can spend those five hours preparing that case and other cases,” Bates said. He added that this was the “secret sauce” his office needed in order to increase criminal convictions over the past two years.
If no money is provided to replace the grant, Bates said his office will have to make budget cuts related to its work with partner agencies and organizations.
The body camera division has reviewed 1,916 cases comprising 22,065 videos containing 14,621 hours of footage, Bates said.
“Ensuring accountability and transparency in law enforcement is crucial to fostering trust between the police and communities they serve,” Bates told council members during the hearing.
The state’s attorney’s office has one Evidence Review Unit staff member for every 140 police officers in Baltimore City. The ratio in surrounding jurisdictions is smaller: 1 to 51 in Howard County, 1 to 69 in Anne Arundel County and 1 to 112 in Baltimore County. Bates said the industry standard is a ratio of 1 to 110.
“We’re doing more with less compared to these other jurisdictions, but we still have so much more we need to do,” Bates said.
Bates said the office’s workload has increased because of an increased number of police arrests, including “double” the number of cases in its misdemeanor jury trial division compared with last year.
Councilmember Paris Gray asked Bates whether he had asked the governor or anyone else at the state level for the evidence review unit funding, noting the “tremendous deficit” the city and state are both facing.
Bates said his office reached out to the Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention and Policy and that they will “continue to talk to Governor Moore and his team.”
“That was one-time ARPA money, and so we’d have to try to find out a special way to try to do that,” Bates said. “We’re trying to find the money however we can.”
Gray suggested Bates and Mayor Brandon Scott ask the governor to provide the funds if it’s not fiscally possible for the city. The governor’s and mayor’s offices didn’t respond to separate requests for comment about whether the state or city would provide the requested funding.
Council President Zeke Cohen said in a statement to The Baltimore Sun that he supports the state’s attorney’s request for additional personnel to review footage from body cameras.
“This is a powerful tool for ensuring investigations can proceed in a timely manner to deliver justice for the victims of crimes and their families,” he said.
Gray said Bates’s office is operating with a $2 million surplus this year and asked for an explanation about his request for additional funding.
Bates said that the office spent almost $900,000 of its rainy day funds to defend against a cyberattack and install a new firewall, and that the office needs money set aside to reconfigure employee raises. He added that the surplus resulted from the departure of a number of prosecutors with six-figure salaries.
“I’m a real big believer — if we’re going to be stewards of the public’s money — I do everything I can, and we try to do everything we can, not to ever have a deficit. Because you never know when a rainy day’s going to happen,” Bates said.
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