“…recent reform efforts to prevent police violence in the USA, including body cameras, implicit bias training, de-escalation, and diversifying police forces, have all failed to further meaningfully reduce police violence rates.” - Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980–2019: a network meta-regression. The Lancet, 2021.
The above claim is followed by three citations, none of which are actual research studies published in peer-reviewed journals. However, one of the citations (an opinion piece) does reference a couple studies. Here’s the relevant passage:
“A large study in 2017 by the Washington, DC, mayor’s office assigned more than a thousand police officers in the District to wear body cameras and more than a thousand to go camera-free. The researchers hoped to find evidence that wearing cameras correlated with better policing, less use of force, and fewer civilian complaints. They found none... Another study, which analyzed the results of 10 randomized controlled trials of body camera use in different nations, was helpfully titled ‘Wearing body cameras increases assaults against officers and does not reduce police use of force.’” - Why filming police violence has done nothing to stop it. MIT Technology Review, 2020
Do these two studies confirm that body cameras have “done nothing” to stop police violence? If so, are these two studies representative of most research on the effect of body cameras on police use of force? How would one know? My Google Scholar search for “body cameras police ‘use of force’ ” got me 21,000 hits. I didn’t check them all, but the first ten looked legit. Hmmm...perhaps the two studies are so convincing, one can simply ignore the other 20,998 (give or take)?
So let’s check them out:
1. Evaluating the effects of police body-worn cameras: A randomized controlled trial The Lab DC, 2017.
Excerpt: “We are unable to reject the null hypotheses that BWCs [body-worn cameras] have no effect on police use of force, citizen complaints, policing activity, or judicial outcomes….[However], BWCs might help improve behavioral outcomes in departments with notable misconduct issues…a sustained effort to implement reforms under external monitoring may have already helped root out many of these types of issues at MPD [Metropolitan Police Force], limiting the added effect of BWCs.”
Here’s a brief summary of what those MPD reforms accomplished:
“In 1998, eleven fatalities resulted from MPD's use of deadly force. Fatalities decreased to four in 1999 and to two in 2000. Due to important changes in its canine operations, over the same time period, canine bites have decreased from occurring approximately 70 percent of the time that canines are deployed to slightly over 20 percent.” - Findings Letter Re Use Of Force By The Washington Metropolitan Police Department
Bottom line: The Washington DC police have already implemented successful police reforms. Body cameras may not add much value.
Verdict: This study does not provide an unequivocal endorsement that body cameras, or police reforms in general, have failed to produce meaningful reductions in police violence.
2. Ariel B, Sutherland A, Henstock D, et al. Wearing body cameras increases assaults against officers and does not reduce police use of force: Results from a global multi-site experiment. European Journal of Criminology. 2016;13(6):744-755. doi:10.1177/1477370816643734
Excerpt: “To mitigate differences in how ‘force’ was defined, our analyses focus on any physical restraint on the force continuum beyond the use of verbal commands during an arrest…”
What is the “force continuum beyond verbal commands”? It starts with empty-hand control, such as putting on handcuffs or grabbing a suspect’s arm. Other uses of force include use of technologies such as batons, chemical sprays, tasers, and guns. However, use of such technologies is far less common than empty-hand control. Unfortunately, this study did not break down the types of physical force used by police, which makes the findings hard to interpret.
Where did the “global multiple-site experiment take place? Six police departments participated in the experiment: five in the UK and one in the US. Two countries hardly qualifies as a “global” experiment. Plus, most of the findings come the from UK, a country that does not routinely arm its police.
Bottom line: It’s hard to interpret the findings since its definition of “force” ranges from handcuffing a suspect to shooting one.
Ironically, the lead author of the last study, Barak Ariel, actually recommends that police wear body cameras under certain conditions. In other words, his take on body cameras is nuanced. Maybe that’s because he’s not an ideologue who feels compelled to dismiss the system’s ability to reform itself - in favor of something more extreme.
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Apropos of ideological imperatives, here’s one of my posts from pre-pandemic times, word for word except for some slight editing and a teeny addition in the last paragraph….
“An ideology is an army of convictions about how the world is and how it ought to be. As befitting a military force, ideologies are fueled by a sense of threat - kept at bay through a fortress-like structure called the ideological square. The ideological square comes in many flavors, including:
Basic 'Us versus Them' Square
Exaggerate our wonderfulness
Exaggerate their awfulness
Downplay our flaws
Downplay their virtues
Incompatible Views of Reality Square
Exaggerate how awful things are now
Downplay how good things are now
Exaggerate how much worse things will be if we don’t prevail
Downplay how much better things will be if they prevail
Incompatible Visions of Possible Futures Square
Exaggerate how great things will be if we prevail
Exaggerate how awful things will be if they prevail
Downplay the potential harm if we prevail
Downplay the potential good if they prevail
Ideologies are typically inspired by utopian visions entailing a radical overhaul of the existing order - what I call the Big Solution. Problems like poverty or environmental harm [or police violence!] may drive initial attraction to a Big Solution, but in time the relationship between problem and solution changes. That is, where once the Big Solution was seen as a means to fixing problems, it eventually becomes an end in itself - one that requires Big Problems to justify. That’s because Big Solutions tend to involve painful sacrifice (the darkness before the dawn). And that pain had better be worth it!”
References:
Ariel, B. et al The Deterrence Spectrum: Explaining Why Police Body-Worn Cameras ‘Work’ or ‘Backfire’ in Aggressive Police–Public Encounters, Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, Volume 12, Issue 1, March 2018, Pages 6–26, https://doi.org/10.1093/police/paw051
Ariel, B., Sutherland, A., Henstock, D. et al. Report: increases in police use of force in the presence of body-worn cameras are driven by officer discretion: a protocol-based subgroup analysis of ten randomized experiments. J Exp Criminol 12, 453–463 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-016-9261-3
Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980–2019: a network meta-regression, authored by the GBD 2019 Police Violence US Subnational Collaborators. The Lancet, Volume 398, Issue 10307, 2–8 October 2021, Pages 1239-1255.
Van Dijk, TA (1995). Discourse Semantics and Ideology. Discourse & Society, 6(2): 243-289.
Yokum, D., Ravishankar, A., & Coppock, A. (2017). Evaluating the effects of police body-worn cameras: A randomized controlled trial. LAB@ DC. Retrieved from https://bwc.thelab.dc.gov/TheLabDC_MPD_ BWC_Working_Paper_10.20.17.pdf
Zuckermann, E. Why filming police violence has done nothing to stop it. MIT Technology Review June 3, 2020