Do Body Cameras Improve Police Conduct?

The police technology discussion tends to focus on privacy issues rather than equality issues—although there is a growing body of scholars to look to equality to critique the new technology. Privacy has dominated much of the body camera debate; but equality issues have also driven much of the movement towards demanding body cameras. The egalitarian argument is that body cameras restrain police use of force by providing an "angel on the shoulder" of the officer, whose deployment of force may well become public.

The problem with this argument, as with much of the body camera debate, is that there is very little data to go on. The "angel on the shoulder" argument depends heavily upon the results of the first, brief study in Rialto, California. More extensive studies in Mesa and Pheonix, Arizona, found that the "angel" effect dropped off after about six months or so. The police became more forceful, and complaints rose. The studies also found that the police were more likely to arrest, rather than release, individuals when they wore body cameras. And the effect on criminal prosecutions depended heavily on access to the cameras, and in particular, whether the prosecutor reviewed the footage, which did not occur in most cases.

One way to read the studies is that supervision really matters. So long as the patrol police think their conduct will be made public or reviewed by a supervisor, they will restrain themselves. When they discover that no-one is reviewing the footage, they return to policing as normal. The footage may have important benefits for defense counsel in humanizing their clients and providing important evidence during a criminal trial. That view is currently anecdotal and needs some further study.

Body cameras are promoted as if they will transform policing. They will not. The problems of police patrol are not driven by the willingness of police officers to restrain episodically, during encounters with civilians. The problems of police patrol concern the distribution of policing, and the style of policing that civilians encounter and endure. So long as the governing monolithic mode of policing is forcible presence on the street in which the dominant role is to establish an unquestioned but temporary physical presence in the community, policing will continue to do what it does least well. Policing could instead establish shared, local, consensual norms coalescing around establishing justice and addressing injustice, including pressing for more livable communities, with better facilities, that are accessible to all. Having a body camera record a flawed policing method will not make that method better. Nor will it encourage trust within those communities that must bear the brunt of forcible policing.