Mass. Court: Police Can Use Bodycams for Domestic Abuse Statements

Police officers can use body cameras to record statements from survivors of domestic violence as long as their allegations are in connection to an incident, Massachusetts’ highest court ruled Thursday.

The ruling came in response to an incident in December 2019 where a man named Charee Rainey forcibly entered his girlfriend’s home before attacking her, according to the SJC ruling.

Rainey’s then-girlfriend contacted the Boston Police Department after the assault. As the survivor spoke, two police officers recorded her. One officer recorded the survivor’s statements in writing, while another recorded her via a body camera.

Using the footage from the body camera, a judge found that Rainey was in violation of his probation, which stemmed from a separate 2013 incident, the SJC ruling said. However, in an appeal, Rainey said that body camera footage violated his fourth amendment rights under the state wiretapping statute.

The wiretapping statute prohibits the secret recording of any “oral communication through the use of any intercepting device by any person other than a person given prior authority by all parties to such communication,” according to the SJC.

However, Supreme Court Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt, who penned Thursday’s decision, disagreed with Rainey’s appeal. According to records, the officer had “announced” he was recording the survivor.

“The resulting video footage was not a clandestine recording precluded by the wiretap statute; rather, it merely preserved the statement (albeit through an alternative, electronic medium) that the victim voluntarily gave to law enforcement officers and which she understood was being recorded by them by means of paper and pen,” Wendlandt wrote.

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