Editorial: L.A. made mess of its police body camera deal. Now, the best way out is forward

Perhaps City Councilman Mitch Englander’s sudden eagerness to delay a massive deal to buy 6,140 body cameras for Los Angeles police officers has nothing to do with the fact that he is in a tough race for county supervisor or the revelation that he received thousands of dollars in campaign donations from a dozen people affiliated with the company seeking the contract.

We’ll take his word that putting the LAPD through more hoops is designed to assuage the cost concerns of his colleagues on the Public Safety Committee. In any case, he is entirely correct that a $31.2-million contract for body cameras, accessories, upgrades and storage ought to be done right. And this one wasn’t. But scrapping the entire deal after so much time, work and money has already been sunk into it is not the answer. The best way out of this corner is to move forward.

A better time for scrutiny was months ago when the Los Angeles Police Department first undertook an unorthodox contracting process that allowed the city to save time by “piggybacking” on a Kern County search for similar equipment — rather than putting the contract out to bid. (The LAPD had already conducted a limited field test of body cameras.) Yet not a peep of protest came then from Englander or his fellow council members. Another good time for someone to say “huh?” was when the police department took possession of 860 Taser body cameras donated by private funds last year. Someone might have asked whether that was tying the department too tightly to a single company.

The troubles go back even farther, to December 2014, when Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that all LAPD officers would be outfitted with body cameras by July 2016, with a price tag in the “high single-digit millions.” Everyone was so enthusiastic about the idea of police accountability at the time that questions about cost and practicality may have fallen by the wayside.

But when the council saw the bill in December 2015, it had a bad case of sticker shock. Council members were right to push back and question the police chief about the contract cost and staff requests — 128 new positions! Since then LAPD officials have responded comprehensively to the questions, and even significantly scaled back the staff positions to just a handful.

But there’s nothing they can do to fix the fact that the contracting process was flawed from the start. It’s a regrettable situation, and it is certainly tempting to dump the Taser deal altogether. But Englander’s motion asking for even more reports by LAPD opens the door to restarting the entire bidding process, which could delay the body camera program by a year, maybe longer.

That’s a bad idea. A delay could imperil the future of the program, especially if the commitment to body cameras were to diminish, and a $1-million federal grant that expires in 2017 could be jeopardized. The best option now is for the City Council to suck it up, let the deal go forward and learn from the mistakes. It’s worth pointing out that no one says the Taser body cameras are inferior. In fact, the department is happy with the Taser cameras it has. And Los Angeles is getting a pretty good deal for the cameras — $99 each. Kern County paid $399 each.

There are many lessons to be learned. One is that using piggyback contracting for large procurements ought to be reserved for more prosaic purchases such as, say, toilet paper — not for massive investments in new and controversial technology.

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