Body cameras

Body cameras lowered cases of abuse for both police and citizens, study finds

BY Brett Smith

In the first major scientific study on police body cameras, researchers found that the cameras lowered reports of both police officer abuses and abusive actions against police.

The study, published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, is just the first step in what is expected to be a long-term investigation of the preventative impacts of body cameras, and the study’s authors say that this effect seen in their research only applied when subject knew they were being video recorded.

“The ‘preventative treatment’ of body-worn-video is the combination of the camera plus both the warning and cognition of the fact that the encounter is being filmed,” said study author Barak Ariel, a research fellow in experimental criminology at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom.

Skeptics of body cameras’ effectiveness often point to the recent case involving Eric Garner, in which the officer determined to be responsible for killing Garner was acquitted by a grand jury despite what appeared to be video evidence of an illegal ‘chokehold’ captured on a by-stander’s cell phone.

Ariel suggested that this interaction between Garner and the police may not have escalated to the point of violence if both Garner and the officers involved knew they were being filmed at the time.

“In the tragic case of Eric Garner, police weren’t aware of the camera and didn’t have to tell the suspect that he, and therefore they, were being filmed,” he said. “With institutionalized body-worn-camera use, an officer is obliged to issue a warning from the start that an encounter is being filmed, impacting the psyche of all involved by conveying a straightforward, pragmatic message: we are all being watched, videotaped and expected to follow the rules.”

In the study, all police shifts in Rialto, California in 2012 were arbitrarily assigned to be either wear a camera or not. Throughout the experiment, researchers gathered more than 50,000 hours of police-public interactions

The researchers found that the use-of-force by camera-wearing officers dropped by 59 percent,which was 2.5 times lower than before the cameras. Reports against officers also fell – by 87 percent compared to 2011.

“Police subcultures of illegitimate force responses are likely to be affected by the cameras, because misconduct cannot go undetected – an external set of behavioral norms is being applied and enforced through the cameras,” Ariel noted. “Police-public encounters become more transparent and the curtain of silence that protects misconduct can more easily be unveiled, which makes misconduct less likely.”

The study team emphasized that their study is just a first step, and their methodology is currently being applied to 30 other police forces around the world. They did say that early signs indicate that the results Rialto were not a fluke. They added that forces considering adding body camera should contact them for data-collection purposes.

“Body-worn-video has the potential to improve police legitimacy and enhance democracy, not least by calming situations on the front line of policing to prevent the pain and damage caused by unnecessary escalations of volatile situations,” Ariel concluded. “But there are substantial effects of body-worn-video that can potentially offset the benefits which future research needs to explore.”