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When an Atlanta police officer working on an FBI fugitive task force shot and killed a wanted but unarmed man in January, he hadn’t yet been assigned a body camera. Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields moved quickly to assign cameras to all of her officers on task forces and was told no. Federal agents never wear body cameras, and they prohibit local officers from wearing them on their joint operations.

Shields said she wasn’t aware of the camera ban until after investigator Sung Kim fatally shot Jimmy Atchison. When she realized the federal agencies would not bend on their “no camera” policies, Shields and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms decided late last month to pull Atlanta’s officers out of joint task forces with the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, about 25 officers total.

“If you’re policing and you’re policing properly,” Shields said, “you have nothing to fear” from wearing a body camera. Bottoms said she didn’t want to be in the position of not having video footage to answer the questions of a grieving family.
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A bill to require federal uniformed officers to wear body cameras, introduced in the House in the fall by Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) and Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and spurred by the Ghaisar killing, did not get a hearing before the 2018 session of Congress ended and will soon be reintroduced, Norton’s and Beyer’s staffs said.