DEA turns off 'enhanced transparency' body cameras

The Drug Enforcement Administration has quietly ended its body camera program barely four years after it began, according to an internal email obtained by ProPublica.

On April 2, DEA headquarters emailed employees announcing that the program had been terminated effective the day before. The DEA has not publicly announced the policy change, but by early April, links to pages about body camera policies on the DEA’s website were broken.

The email said the agency made the change to be “consistent” with a Trump executive order rescinding the 2022 requirement that all federal law enforcement agents use body cameras.

But at least two other federal law enforcement agencies within the Justice Department — the U.S. Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — are still requiring body cameras, according to their spokespeople. The FBI referred questions about its body camera policy to the Justice Department, which declined to comment.

The DEA did not respond to questions about its decision to stop using the cameras, saying that the agency “does not comment on tools and techniques.” Reuters reported on the change as part of a story about budget cuts for law enforcement offices.

One former federal prosecutor expressed concern that the change would make life more difficult for DEA agents.

“The vast majority of times I viewed body camera footage is based on allegations from a defense attorney about what a cop did,” said David DeVillers, former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio. “And I would say 95% of the time it absolves the cop of wrongdoing.”

The Justice Department started requiring that its federal agents wear the devices in 2021 in the wake of the protests over George Floyd’s death the previous summer.

“We welcome the addition of body worn cameras and appreciate the enhanced transparency and assurance they provide to the public and to law enforcement officers working hard to keep our communities safe and healthy,” then-DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said in a Sept. 1, 2021, press release announcing the use of the cameras.

In May 2022, then-President Joe Biden issued an executive order expanding the use of body cameras to all federal law enforcement officers.

In January, the incoming Trump administration rescinded that order, along with almost 100 others it considered “harmful.”

In early February, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, was one of the first agencies to get rid of its body cameras. Subsequent videos show plainclothes immigration agents making arrests with no visible body cameras.

The DOJ wrote in a 2022 Office of Inspector General management report that the cameras were a “means of enhancing police accountability and the public’s trust in law enforcement.” Studies have consistently shown that departments that use body cameras experience a drop in complaints against officers, according to the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum, though it’s not clear if the drop is due to improvements in officer behavior or to a decrease in frivolous complaints.

“Eliminating these videos is really taking away a tool that we’ve seen be of benefit to law enforcement practices,” said Cameron McEllhiney, executive director of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement. “It’s also a great teaching tool, besides keeping community members safe from the potential misconduct that could occur.”

The DOJ put a lot of money into the body camera initiative. In August of 2021, it awarded Axon, the company that dominates the body camera market, a $30.4 million contract for cameras and the software to handle the evidence they created. The contract, according to Axon, remains active. But only about one-sixth of it has been paid out, according to federal contracting data.

The most recent publicly available version of the DEA’s body camera policy dates to December 2022. It only required agents to wear the devices when they were conducting preplanned arrests or searches and seizures that required a warrant. It also only required DEA officers to wear their body cameras when they were working within the United States.

Agents had 72 hours after the end of an operation to upload their video evidence, unless there was a shooting, in which case they were instructed to upload the video evidence as soon as possible. The policy laid out in detail how and by whom evidence from the cameras should be handled in the event officers used force, and it authorized the DEA to use the video evidence when investigating its own officers.

The DEA had planned to implement the policy in phases so that eventually its officers nationwide would be wearing the devices when serving warrants or carrying out planned arrests. In its 2025 fiscal year budget request to Congress, the agency asked for $15.8 million and 69 full time employees, including five attorneys, “to enable the DEA’s phased implementation plan of nationwide use of Body Worn Cameras.”

Records obtained via Freedom of Information Act request by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington show that the Biden-era DOJ had an ambitious plan to capture agencywide metrics and data about the efficiency and use of body cameras by its law enforcement officers.

Laura Iheanachor, senior counsel at CREW, said that before federal law enforcement started wearing body cameras, several local police agencies had declined to participate in federal task forces because doing so would have forced their officers to remove their cameras.

“It’s a protective measure for officers, for the public,” Iheanachor said. “And it allows state and federal law enforcement to work together in harmony.”