Police and cameras? Keep on studying
Adding cameras to be worn on the chests of police officers was supposed to change behavior and make interactions between cops and civilians safer for all sides. Yet the largest study of body-worn cameras for police officers does not seem to support that rational assumption.
In fact, the study seems to show officers with cameras used force and received civilian complaints at about the same rates as officers wearing cameras. In other words, the prospect of being found out did not change behavior.
The study was done over seven months, conducted by David Yokum at the Lab @ DC, a team of scientists embedded in D.C. government, and Anita Ravishankar at D.C.’s Metropolitan Police. It involved just over 1,000 Washington, D.C., police officers being randomly assigned body-worn cameras, while another 1,000 were not. The researchers then kept track of complaints, use-of-force incidents and other occurrences to try and measure whether behavior changed while an officer was wearing a camera.
Such cameras were supposed to help reduce violence of police against civilians and restore public trust after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. By 2015, some 95 percent of departments had reported they either were using body cameras or were going to in the near future, the study found. There was reason for the move, both a need to quiet citizen concerns about police violence as well as the need for cops to be able to show their work. A video, after all, can clear cops as well as condemn them. Besides, a 2012 experiment in California had shown cameras had a calming effect, including a 90 percent decline in complaints filed by civilians against officers. That study dealt only with 54 officers, compared to the 2,000-plus in D.C. The bigger sample size has an edge in reliability.
Because body-worn cameras do not come cheap, more study is needed to determine whether they are worthwhile public investments. The federal government, according to a New York Times story, has given police departments more than $40 million to buy cameras, a figure that doesn’t include the millions spent at the state and local levels. There’s more than the costs of equipment; storing data is expensive. Privacy advocates also worry about increased surveillance of civilians.
For now, the results are too preliminary to change public policy — more fact-finding is needed. Even in the rigorous study, other factors could be influencing results. In D.C., for example, the department has been working for a decade to improve its policing practices. Perhaps solid training and recruiting good officers eliminated the differences between camera-wearing cops and others. Both citizens and departments across the country want officers to do the right thing, with or without a camera, especially under trying circumstances.
In Santa Fe, city police began wearing cameras about a year ago (officers from the Santa Fe County Sheriff ’s Department have used them for several years). Cameras can be a step forward in building trust — citizens should feel confident that video exists to avoid the tiresome, “she said, he claimed” stories so prevalent after tense situations. Even so, if the video is not turned on or cameras are on the blink, they do no good. (Video of a July shooting of a mentally ill man cut out just before a crucial part of the standoff, for example.) For bodyworn cameras to do any good, they need to be on and working, as well as available for the public to review.
The real lesson of the D.C. study, of course, might be less about the impact of body-worn cameras and more about departments setting strong use-of-force policies and recruiting solid cops — creating police forces that operate ethically on or off camera.