St. Louis city’s chief fiscal officer is urging the city’s top leaders to consider using capital funds meant for neighborhood improvements to pay for police-worn body cameras, according to an Aug. 25 letter from Comptroller Darlene Green to Mayor Francis G. Slay and Board of Aldermen President Lewis Reed.
Green said she received a letter from the St. Louis City NAACP two days before, which encouraged her to make this push.
“I agree [with the NAACP] that the longer we delay funding body cameras, the more we jeopardize the city’s peace, health and safety,” she wrote. “It is in our power as city leaders to act responsibly by taking the appropriate steps to avoid further unrest.”
Slay, Green and Reed all sit on the three-member Board of Estimate and Apportionment, which is the city’s main fiscal body.
“I am recommending to the Board of E&A that we would make an urgent request to the Board of Aldermen to immediately reallocate a sufficient portion of the ward capital accounts to fund body cameras for police officers,” she wrote.
Green projects that the body-camera program would cost $1.5 to $2 million, and they could fund it through the $30 million in “carry-over funds” that are part of the city’s Capital Improvement Program – funds generated from the city’s half-cent sales tax. The $30 million has accumulated over several years, and the aldermen have earmarked for these funds for certain things. She said that they could restore these funds within one year through grants and other funding sources.
For fiscal year 2016, the city has budgeted $43.8 million for its Capital Improvement Program. About $9.6 million is projected to go towards “ward improvement” projects. For the past five years, the wards have not seen all of these funds because about $2.5 million has been reallocated to balance the budget, Green told The St. Louis American.
The city has finally been able to fully restore those ward improvement funds, she said. And in the city’s projections for the fiscal year 2016, leaders anticipated that each ward would receive $342,000 for improvements to parks, sidewalks, dumpsters and other such projects.
A small portion, about $1.77 million, of the half-cent sales tax revenue goes towards the police department for “debt service,” and some other funds go towards citywide capital projects, major parks and recreation centers.
The body-camera program would not affect or take away from these allotments for the wards or other projects, Green said.
In the NAACP’s letter to Green, St. Louis City NAACP President Adolphus Pruitt said the implementation of body cameras should be declared an emergency. His letter comes less than a week after heavily-armed city police patrolled protests on Aug. 19 in the Fountain Park neighborhood after an officer-involved shooting. Police deployed tear gas in the North St. Louis City neighborhood, which is largely comprised of one-family and two-family homes.
Pruitt said the police’s response to protestors in officer-involved shootings have been “consistently problematic, resource draining, impacting commerce and in some cases an endangerment to the public at large.”
Just yesterday, attorneys for Mansur Ball-Bey, the 18-year-old who was shot and killed by police in the Fountain Park neighborhood, said they have spoken to witnesses who claim police killed an innocent bystander – not someone who fled the house that police raided that morning, as police have said. Attorneys said body cameras would have prevented any kind of contradicting stories. However, the police department does not own any cameras.
“We have about 100 in-car cameras,” Police Chief Sam Dotson told the American, “but body cameras are something that we don’t have yet. It’s always a question in any big city about funding, about how you fund a program like that.”
Dotson – along with some law professors from Saint Louis University – said that the laws surrounding citizens’ privacy in the use of body cameras has to be strongly considered before the camera program gets up and running.
“All future officer-involved shootings have the potential of lighting the fuse of a powder-keg,” Pruitt said.
Follow this reporter on Twitter @rebeccarivas.
