More than 70 police officers in Northern Ireland have been disciplined after they accessed bodycam footage of a drugs arrest for “entertainment and amusement”.
During the incident an officer made an error administering a criminal caution, “causing a colleague to laugh out loud”.
The arrest, captured on the body-mounted camera, then appears to have been widely accessed among PSNI officers.
The police ombudsman’s office said the PSNI had taken “management action” against 74 officers. Its investigators found that between December 2019 and November 2022 the footage had been watched 248 times by 82 officers and one civilian staffer at 20 different police stations across Northern Ireland.
Most had watched it once or twice, but one officer had watched it 21 times.
They also found that only five officers and one civilian staff member had a legitimate reason to access the footage.
Hugh Hume, the chief executive of the police ombudsman’s office, said: “The video may have been viewed for entertainment and amusement, but the officers who did so showed little regard for the privacy of the man being arrested, nor for the emotional wellbeing of their colleague featured in the video.”
He added that the investigation found an “apparent lack of awareness” that accessing the footage could constitute a criminal or misconduct offence.
Hume said: “A number of officers indicated in their responses that as a result of the investigation they had refreshed their knowledge of PSNI guidance regarding body-worn video, which I welcome.”
He said it was imperative that body-worn footage “should only be accessed for lawful policing purposes”.
The PSNI said it accepted three of the recommendations made by the police ombudsman and that it had introduced additional safeguards around body-worn video.
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Hume, however, said he was disappointed that a fourth recommendation was not accepted. It involving random sampling of the bodycam footage database to see if there was more systemic inappropriate access.
He said: “Given the weaknesses in the control of access to body-worn video, it is therefore our view that there remains a significant residual risk that private and personal data can be accessed without a legitimate policing purpose.”
The PSNI deputy chief constable, Chris Todd, said a number of protections were in place including data protection laws and regular random sampling by management of requests for access to bodycam footage. He was happy that sampling had achieved the same end result as the ombudsman.