After conducting an inspection of compliance with the Law on Personal Data Protection by the Municipal Police of the City of Belgrade (as an internal organizational unit within the City Administration of the City of Belgrade as a single authority), the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection sent a letter to the mayor of Belgrade.

Enclosed with the letter, the Commissioner issued the mayor with a Warning addressed to the Municipal Police in which he highlighted the identified irregularities and ordered the Municipal Police to notify him within 15 days of the measures and activities it intends to undertake in order to remedy those irregularities.

The Commissioner initiated an inspection ex officio after learning that the Municipal Police owned cameras which it used for recording events within its course of work. The aim of the inspection was to find facts about the legal grounds and purpose of processing of the personal data generated in the recording process.

The inspection found that the Municipal Police had at its disposal 250 body cameras, of which 216 were worn by municipal police officers who had been issued with these body cameras as part of their uniform.

In the course of the inspection, the Municipal Police explained that the legal instruments which provided grounds for recording/data processing were the Decision on the Colour and Marking of Vehicles, Vessels and Equipment used by the Municipal Police and the Instructions on the Use of Official Cameras. Since the Constitution provides in Article 42 (which provision has been upheld by a Decision of the Constitutional Court) that legal grounds for personal data processing must be set out in a law in order to be valid, it is clear that the instruments cited here, being absolutely inferior in legal terms, cannot provide proper grounds for such data processing. Furthermore, such instruments also directly contravene the provisions of the Law on Municipal Police which govern the possibilities and manner of video surveillance of premises and buildings.

It is certainly no excuse that virtually no recordings have been made in practice. Indeed, this was not due to any consideration for the constitutional and legal guarantees of citizens' rights, but due to the extremely poor technical specifications of the purchased cameras, both in terms of autonomy, as they tend to drain the battery pretty fast, and in terms of image resolution, which is so poor that it is not possible to identify recorded persons or read the licence plates of recorded cars.

Similarly, it is neither legally nor de facto acceptable for the Municipal Police to wear these unusable cameras "as a precaution to protect the integrity of municipal police officers" because citizens allegedly "treat them differently when they know they are being recorded."

In his letter to the mayor, the Commissioner underscored that city authorities had to pay much more attention to citizens' privacy, improve their attitude to processing of citizens' personal data and process any such data in full observance of the constitutional and legal guarantees relating to the right to personal data protection.