Body-Worn Cameras' Effects on Police Officer and Citizen Behavior: A Systematic Review

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"Law enforcement agencies have rapidly adopted BWCs in the last decade with the hope that they might improve police conduct, accountability, and transparency, especially regarding use of force.

Overall, there remains substantial uncertainty about whether BWCs can reduce officer use of force, but the variation in effects suggests there may be conditions in which BWC could be effective. BWCs also do not seem to affect other police and citizen behaviors in a consistent manner, including officers’ self‐initiated activities or arrest behaviors, dispatched calls for service, or assaults and resistance against police officers. 

BWCs can reduce the number of citizen complaints against police officers, but it is unclear whether this finding signals an improvement in the quality of police–citizen interactions or a change in reporting.

Research has not directly addressed whether BWCs can strengthen police accountability systems or police–citizen relationships."

Police Body-Worn Cameras Must Come With Clear Policies

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"The police shooting deaths of Indigenous community members Chantel Moore on June 4 and Rodney Levi on June 14 in New Brunswick have reignited the debate over whether to outfit police across Canada with body-worn cameras (BWCs). Just six days after Rodney Levi was killed, police in Mississauga, Ontario, shot and killed Pakistani-Canadian Ejaz Choudry. The week before Moore’s death, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, an Afro-Indigenous woman, died when she fell from her 24th-floor balcony during an encounter with police in Toronto. Police officers in Toronto, like most law enforcement officers in Canada, do not wear BWCs, but the devices could be adopted in Canada’s largest city by the end of the summer."

The Milwaukee Police Department's Body-Worn Camera Program

"This brief describes the results of the Urban Institute’s evaluation of the Milwaukee Police Department’s body-worn camera program. From October 2015 to December 2016, the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) deployed body-worn cameras (BWCs) in a phased rollout to all of its roughly 1,100 patrol officers. Through a randomized controlled trial of 504 officers, the Urban Institute found that those who wore BWCs conducted fewer subject stops and were less likely to receive a complaint than officers who were not equipped with cameras. However, BWCs had no effect on whether officers engaged in use of force during the study period."
 

Why Police Body Cams Aren't What They Seem To Be
"Somewhere between one-fifth and one-half of U.S. police officers are wearing body-worn video cameras. It’s hard to tell the exact number, but we know the number is rising.

Body cams, which clip to the uniform or headgear of an officer, and are intended to capture the officer’s-eye-view of incidents, have been called the most important solution to police transparency in America. But as a recent podcast of our Quality Policing series shows, it’s worth looking beyond the rhetoric.

'Today I think I have found the solution that will help law enforcement officers and our citizens go home safe,' Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) said in 2015. 'That solution [is] body-worn cameras to be worn by our law enforcement officers throughout this country.'

There was literally no evidence that this was true."

Why Don't Police Body Cameras Work Like We Expected?
"Police-worn body cameras do not reduce the instances of police use of force. Nor do they reduce citizen complaints about excessive force. These are the unexpected findings from the largest study to date on the subject, which casts doubt on the generally accepted wisdom regarding body camera effectiveness. “We found essentially that we could not detect any statistically significant effect of the body-worn cameras,” said Anita Ravishankar, one of the researchers behind the study."

How Body Cameras Affect Community Members' Perceptions of Police
"Members of the public often do not accurately remember whether police officers with whom they interact are wearing body worn cameras (BWC). Yet despite this poor recall, this randomized controlled trial of BWC use in a single jurisdiction finds that community members are more satisfied with police encounters when the officer is wearing a body camera. While application of procedurally just practices is associated with greater levels of resident satisfaction with police than just wearing a camera, combining the two produces even higher ratings of police. These findings suggest that policies on camera use may enhance the technology’s ability to improve interactions between police and the public."

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ACLU: A Model Act for Regulating the Use of Wearable Body Cameras by Law Enforcement

Why Canadian Police Services are not Adopting Body Cameras
"Police body-worn cameras (BWCs) have been a topic of interest in recent months because of their touted benefits of reducing use of force and improving accountability. Thousands of law enforcement agencies in the U.S. have already implemented BWC technology. Conversely, only a handful of agencies in Canada have adopted body cameras.

The largest police service in Canada -- the RCMP -- recently decided to abandon plans to adopt BWCs citing high costs as a main reason. However, the largest municipal service in the country -- the Toronto Police Service (TPS) -- is in the process of finding a suitable supplier before implementing the technology. This comes in response to Toronto's 10-month long study that failed to determine the effectiveness and efficacy of BWCs."

Toronto Police want to Deploy Body-Worn Cameras Service-Wide
"The Toronto Police Service is seeking permission to start the process for acquiring body-worn cameras for all officers, following a high-profile pilot project amid rising tensions between police and members of the public across North America.

The body-camera pilot project wrapped up in March, and the subsequent report was presented to the Police Services Board Thursday.

Among the report's findings is the fact that, although the technology didn't meet officers' complete needs, body-worn cameras 'do provide the unbiased, independent account of police/community interactions, as expected,' a statement from Toronto police said....

...The pilot project and subsequent review found that as many as 95 per cent of the public and 85 per cent of officers support the use of body-worn cameras, according to the statement. The report noted that support rose in both camps as the pilot project went on."

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Ferguson and the Feds have an Agreement on Policing Reform. Here's Why it Might not Work
"A year and a half after massive protests in Ferguson, Missouri, reacting to the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown, Ferguson on Tuesday approved an agreement with the federal government to reform the city's police department and court system.

The agreement comes after Brown's death led to massive protests in Ferguson, helping give rise to the Black Lives Matter movement and its protests against racial disparities in the criminal justice system and police use of force. 

Justice Department and Ferguson negotiators tentatively agreed to policing reforms in January.  But the agreement stalled lathe Ferguson City Council raised concerns about costs.  But the Justice Department threatened a lawsuit, and told Ferguson officials that their cost concerns were inflated, pushing city officials to finally accept the agreement."

Privacy and Public Safety: A Progress Report - Expert Panel Discussion https://t.co/1IEPSLuk46 via @YouTube

— Crim Library UTL (@CrimLib) February 12, 2016

Watching the Watchmen: Best Practices for Police Body Cameras
"Coverage of recent police killings has prompted a much-needed debate on law enforcement reform, and proposals for police body cameras have featured heavily in these discussions.  Body cameras undoubtedly gather valuable evidence of police misconduct, and although research on the effects of body cameras is comparatively limited there are good reasons to believe that they can improve police behavior.  

However, without the right policies in place the use of police body cameras could result in citizens' privacy being needlessly violated.  In addition, poorly considered police body camera policies governing the storage and release of footage might be too costly to implement.
 
This paper examines the research on the costs and benefits of police body cameras, arguing that the devices can, if properly deployed and regulated, provide a valuable disincentive to police abuses as well as valuable evidence for punishing abuses when they occur."

What Good is a Video You Can't See?
"Police body cameras are meant to be a tool of public accountability.  But even experts can't agree on how to make sure that happens.

Body cameras were introduced as a tool of public accountability, but making their videos available to the public might be too fraught, too complex, and too expensive to actually put into practice.

Much of the ambiguity around body cameras comes down to this: Despite their general popularity, despite being the only policy change called for by the family of Michael Brown, body cameras are a little weird. They are both a way for the public to see what police officers are doing and a way for people to be surveilled. If a body-cam program, scaled across an entire department, were to release its footage willy-nilly, it would be a privacy catastrophe for untold people. Police-worn cameras don't just capture footage from city streets or other public places. Officers enter people's homes, often when those people are at their most vulnerable"

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