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A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

207 points by ddlatham 9y ago

ddlatham 9y ago
Besides the overall result, another fact that surprised me: The devices vary in price, but the biggest expense is the data-storage cost. In Washington, M.P.D. officers collect about a thousand hours of footage a day. About 40 percent of it is deleted within 90 days, while the rest is to be kept for months, years or decades, depending on the statute of limitations for the charges connected to the footage.
- gebeeson 9y ago
  Having worked with law enforcement I can expand on this - car dash cam footage takes an impressive amount of storage as well. Given how the cameras are triggered, sometimes the footage is not needed or useful and therefore can be deleted. In other instances, depending on case charges and footage, the video has to be kept until further notice - the word 'indefinitely' is rarely used but that is the implication. Of course the body cams adds to this.
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  This sounds like a good use case for cold storage like AWS glacier. If you assume 1000 hours of footage would be ~600GB, 1 day of footage would cost ~2.4 cents per month on glacier until you go to retrieve it. Or, 75 cents per month for each month of footage. Most footage would never be watched and eventually purged. I'm not sure how chain of custody would work...perhaps digitally signing the uploads and keeping those signature records locally at the station. But the USG uses AWS, so I'm sure some solution could be found.
  - CobrastanJorji 9y ago
    It does sound like a good use case for that, and it is, but you're thinking like a Silicon Valley engineer type, not like a company that sells products to the government: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-16/taser-is-charging-stunning-fees-to-handle-police-video https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-16/taser-is-... Taser probably just puts the videos in AWS or something, but the markup is obscene.
jandrese 9y ago
It probably shouldn't be that big of a surprise. Police officers are almost entirely decent people that shouldn't feel the need to change their behavior just because they're being recorded. Regular citizens would already be on their best behavior around cops, the camera doesn't change much. I think people get a skewed perception of the police force from a relatively small number of highly publicized incidents. Counter option: The DC cops are so brazen that they don't even care if they're being caught on film. This doesn't seem likely, since it would be such an easy payday for some hungry defense lawyer.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  >I think people get a skewed perception of the police force from a relatively small number of highly publicized incidents. ...who receive lots of back up from other police officers, superiors and the law.
- losvedir 9y ago
  Surprised to see this downvoted - it was my initial thought as well. If most cops are decent and doing what they think is right, then that wouldn't change just because they're wearing bodycams. That said, I still think bodycams are a great idea. I hadn't heard justification of them based on improving some aggregate statistics before. Instead, I've always thought they were good for those particularly difficult "he said / she said" cases that capture public attention.
  - gph 9y ago
    >Instead, I've always thought they were good for those particularly difficult "he said / she said" cases that capture public attention. I agree, but at what price point would you say it's worth it? In principle I want bodycams, but with this new study it's making me wonder if pragmatically it's really worth spending millions of dollars each year just for a handful of difficult 'he said / she said' cases to be better resolved. Probably it still is given that these small handful of cases get the biggest media attention / public backlash that hurts the image of the police. In that sense bodycams can almost be thought of as a public relations expense.
givinguflac 9y ago
Personally I think police could not only solve their storage problem, but also create a revenue stream and public good will: by simply storing the video on a public service like YouTube. It also increases transparency though, which is probably why it will never happen.
- eric_h 9y ago
  There will be footage recorded by those cameras that will drastically impinge on the privacy of civilians should it be shared publicly. It's a nice idea, but I think it has some pretty significant potential for downsides.
  - jMyles 9y ago
    I find this idea very toxic. If the state can send an agent somewhere, then that place and the goings-on that were witnessed are a matter of public record. If that isn't so, and isn't sacred, then we're saying that secrecy in policing is normal, and that goes against hundreds of years of progress in the common-law tradition. In order for people to enjoy the kind of privacy you discuss, we need to have non-state support services that are completely disconnected from the matter of enforcement of th e law.
    - taeric 9y ago
      This is trivial to argue against, though. Officer heads to restroom to help patient that is having seizures. Heck, officer heads anywhere to help citizen having seizures. (Substitute any of a number of incidents and the argument remains mostly the same.) Is it public record that it happened? Yes. Should it be shielded from anyone knowing? I don't think so. Should it be publicly broadcast? Almost certainly not.
      - jMyles 9y ago
        The underlying question here is: what does enforcement of the public ordinances have to do with medical aid? Why has our society conflated those? Why has our society conflated law enforcement with emergency response at all? What do these two things have to do with each other? That's the problem. The fact that we're talking seriously about affording public policing a sphere of secrecy is just a symptom of that problem.
theptip 9y ago
TL;DR: Previous sociology research had suggested that filming people makes them more civil. New research on fails to replicate this result in the context of police body cameras. Doesn't seem like a very interesting result to me; I hadn't previously heard of the "calming effect" as a reason to use body cameras. The primary reason to use cameras is to increase accountability, so that police officers are less able to get away with murder, planting evidence, being overtly racist, etc.
- secfirstmd 9y ago
  Also less false allegations against them
- alexandercrohde 9y ago
  Exactly. (How is this at the bottom? I read every single response to this thread waiting to find somebody pointing this out.)
- gowld 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(legal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(legal)
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  Cities have up to hundreds of autonomous precincts to comprise a single police department. Every single city and municipality has its own separate police department. States pass laws allowing for overlapping jurisdictions at their discretion. No study about "police officers" is going to address that. Elevating these studies to that level is going to continually get conflicting results. No person knows what a random internal police department's memo on what justified force is. Nobody will know if some local municipality had just reviewed and changed that standard, or if they are currently in a bout of actual corruption.
whack 9y ago
Before people start wildly speculating, it's worth considering the many good explanations and interpretations suggested in the article: One hypothesis is that officers got used to the cameras and became desensitized to them. But the researchers saw no difference in behavior during the initial phase, when the cameras were new. (The researchers also checked the data to make sure officers were turning their cameras on when they were supposed to, and found a very high level of compliance.) Another possibility is that officers without cameras were acting like officers with cameras, simply because they knew other officers had the devices. An equally plausible explanation has to do with fear: In Washington, police officers are instructed to turn on their cameras whenever they answer a call or encounter the public in a law-enforcement context. The kinds of situations that might lead to civilian complaints or use-of-force incidents are high-stress encounters. When frightened, humans tend to act on automatic fear responses (or, in the case of good police officers in an ideal world, training). “It’s a lot to ask, psychologically speaking, to not only remember the camera is on but to moderate your behavior,” said Mr. Yokum, the head of the Lab @ DC. Finally, cameras may have had less impact in Washington, D.C., because the police department there has already had to confront excessive-force problems. After a devastating 1998 Washington Post series revealed that the city’s police department had shot and killed more people per resident in the 1990s than any other police force in a large American city, the Department of Justice entered into a memorandum of agreement with D.C. to reform its policing. “We went through a transformation with regard to use of force when Justice came in here,” Chief Newsham said. Cities that lack such accountability in their police culture may find cameras more effective, under this theory. (The Rialto Police Department had been reeling from a series of scandals when the Rialto study showed a large impact from cameras.) Even if cameras do not reduce violent encounters, they can still offer other kinds of benefits: for training, or to hold a rogue officer accountable after the fact. To Chief Newsham, the cameras’ primary benefit is to improve relations with the community. “The transparency and trust that the community has, knowing your department is recording the interactions, I don’t think you can undervalue that,” he said.
- zzalpha 9y ago
  Funny, I noticed an absence of a far more cynical explanation that made me immediately doubt how balanced the article was: if cops know that the footage is difficult to obtain or can be easily suppressed, deleted, or otherwise buried, or if the legal system is already heavily biased in favour of law enforcement such that body cam footage rarely changes trial outcomes, then body cams don't actually contribute to additional accountability and therefore there's no reason to change behaviours. tl;dr I see no reason to believe body cams have actually resulted in greater transparency or accountability due to offsetting institutional factors.
NuSkooler 9y ago
Somehow I'm not surprised. Incidents are now caught on camera and spread around the news & social media. Yet, in a large portion of the cases where the cops are clearly in the wrong they get a slap on the wrist if that. There is no real incentive to change their behavior camera or not.
- occultist_throw 9y ago
  Indeed not. The prosecution is on the Cops' side. The prosecution decides how vigorously they go after people in Grand Jury and open court. The Judicial system is on the Cops' side, even if during a jury trial they give words that "cops are just like everyone else" - they aren't. It isn't a thin blue line. It's a big fat highlighter blue bar. The people, vs the Judicial System. And they're the ones that make and enforce the rules.
vladislav 9y ago
1) The feedback loop is not just being filmed on the job, but the repercussions of being filmed while doing something illegal and being punished for it. It might take time for this to sink in, especially for the bad apples. 2) Having body cams on all police officers simply makes sense, regardless of the immediate effect. Knowing exactly (or more about) what happened when a citizen armed on behalf of the state interacts with regular citizens is an obvious priority. Even if enforcing body cams doesn't lead to a reduction of police crime, it will certainly lead to more legal action against police crime, which is typically stifled by police buddy tactics.
- rocqua 9y ago
  There is a decent privacy argument to be made against body cams. Not just for the officers themselves, but also for the people approached by the officers. In many cases, when police need to get involved people aren't showing their best sides. Recordings of that kind of stuff are rather sensitive. You gotta remember that body cams can't just be used against corrupt police, they can just as easily be used against the public. Consider how a closeted gay person reacts when caught drunk with a boyfriend and how the presence of a camera effects that.
  - comicjk 9y ago
    This seems obvious to me, but maybe it isn't based on the implementations of body cameras I'm hearing about: the police should not have access to the videos! A camera should automatically upload its contents to off-site encrypted servers, with the courts having sole access to the decryption keys. No one should be able to access the data without a court order. It's strange to me that, when faced with problems of official power vs privacy, people never seem to remember the idea of warrants, which are baked into our legal system and have been used to address privacy problems for centuries.
    - weberc2 9y ago
      Why shouldn't the public have access at least to the videos filmed in public?
djyaz1200 9y ago
Run this study again and put a prominent blinking light on the camera and I bet the result is different. It's not the fact that you are being watched that changes behavior, it's being aware of the fact that you are being watched. This is why many stores show you the video of yourself as you walk in. The mere presence of cameras is not enough... people have to be reminded they are there.
BugsJustFindMe 9y ago
> Researchers tracked use-of-force incidents, This is literally impossible. Researchers tracked reports of use-of-force incidents, which is factually rather different. If you hypothetically have fewer incidents and simultaneously higher percentage reporting of incidents when people are able to see if there's probable evidence supporting their complaints (i.e. the visible presence of a body camera), you could end up with a similar number of reports. This would be especially true when reported incident counts are percentagewise quite low relative to total encounters. I'm not saying that this is true or even likely. I'm saying that it sounds like they didn't actually learn what they are saying they learned, and if true then that cavalier lack of contemplation is very upsetting. > The primary outcomes of interest were documented uses of force and civilian complaints The DC/Baltimore area has had some recent high profile falsification of evidence accidentally caught on camera cases. I notice that it's not discussed. Maybe catching when police plant evidence is a legitimately worthwhile endeavor. Besides, we already know that gathering evidence of malpractice is irrelevant if no meaningful punishment ever results from it.
- dpark 9y ago
  > This is literally impossible. Researchers tracked reports of use-of-force incidents, which is factually rather different. This is unfair. You're complaining that they didn't do something that you admit is impossible. They measured essentially everything they could.
  - BugsJustFindMe 9y ago
    I'm not upset about what they measured. I'm upset about what they claim they learned from it and about the kinds of causation-related lemmata they (erroneously) assert in the report.
    - dpark 9y ago
      Firstly, you're critiquing a study based on a journalist's write-up about it. Secondly, you're essentially making an epistemological argument. You could apply your core argument to almost anything and come up with the assertion that the research is invalid. "Researchers tracked use-of-force incidents" -> "Researchers tracked reports of use-of-force incidents, which is factually rather different. "Researchers observed bosons at 125GeV" -> "Researchers observed detections of bosons at 125GeV, which is factually rather different." This is merely a pedantic argument that things are not truly knowable. But whether the Higgs boson exists and whether body cameras reduce police violence are not unknowable questions. Even if we cannot directly measure, the indirect measures are meaningful to the questions. Now, if there's something else that the researchers should measure, then that would be useful criticism.
mtalantikite 9y ago
I only briefly scanned the published paper [1], but I saw no mention made about whether or not the officers knew this study was happening to their teams. Does anyone know if the study was blind? [1] http://bwc.thelab.dc.gov/static/files/supplementary-materials.pdf http://bwc.thelab.dc.gov/static/files/supplementary-material...
- mcguire 9y ago
  Were the officers who were not filming also not wearing cameras?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Overtonwindow 9y ago
I think for police cameras, and the idea of being watched as a catalyst for better behavior, the focus of behavior modification is misplaced. IMO police in America have become separated from the rest of society, through hubris, militarization, or some perceived "us versus them" thinking. They appear to see their behavior, regardless of what that behavior is, as protecting the public, and stopping others from breaking the law. The police as an institution have placed themselves in a sphere of superiority, not beholden to others. We must work to bring the idea of police officer closer to that of citizen, stop the militarization, stop the us versus them thinking, and teach officers that they are to peaceful officers that serve and protect, not an authoritarian paramilitary force, immune from society's laws and norms.
will_brown 9y ago
I was recently the victim of an armed kidnapping, escaping only by jumping out of my own car from the driver seat while in gear with the gunman in the passenger seat. By the time the police arrived, my attacker escaped in my car and the first words out of the sergeants mouth was “cut the crap, quit jerking us around, what really happened?” Sure enough I was in a jurisdiction that only two months prior was equipped with vest cameras (due to community outrage over an execution style killing of a 21 year old black male pulled over with a phone the police thought was a gun). As an officer of the court myself I was beyond dismayed and obtained 2 different copies of police video from the scene...wouldn’t you know both officers vest videos were redacted and specifically edited out the audio of the sergeant’s first words to me and the sergeant’s video didn’t exist. The dvds even say redacted right on them, and I knew before I even watched, which is funny because I had to pay ~$100 for the video, basically paying for the time it took for the department to watch and redact the 1 part I really wanted. How would such a system have any effect of police officer behavior?
- cryptonector 9y ago
  Fixing this will have to be the next step. The first step was getting the body cams. Also, you could probably file a suit to get the unredacted video, and you could make a big stink about this. That's how you get to the next step.
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    I would be shocked if the unredacted video still exists.
    - fao_ 9y ago
      It would be illegal otherwise, wouldn't it? Redaction of evidence
      - djrogers 9y ago
        You would have to prove a) that it was evidence of a crime, and b) the police had reason to believe or know it was such. In the absence of laws requiring full transparency and access to body cam footage, the body cams are just likely to be abused.
gremlinsinc 9y ago
See the difference is cops - get away with anything/almost anything. So without a 'penalty' or fear factor for doing wrong, what's the point if they do, other than possible public humiliation?
floatingatoll 9y ago
Is the Washington DC police district known to be relatively free of the corruption that plagues e.g. Oakland and Chicago? It's possible they measured a district that's already "constantly under observation", and thus detected no significant behavioral shifts.
- djrogers 9y ago
  If you read the article you would find that very issue addressed: "After a devastating 1998 Washington Post series revealed that the city’s police department had shot and killed more people per resident in the 1990s than any other police force in a large American city, the Department of Justice entered into a memorandum of agreement with D.C. to reform its policing. “We went through a transformation with regard to use of force when Justice came in here,” Chief Newsham said. Cities that lack such accountability in their police culture may find cameras more effective, under this theory. "
gwern 9y ago
Rossi's Metallic Laws of social program evaluation ( https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/1987-rossi https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/1987-rossi ): - The Iron Law of Evaluation: "The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero." - The Stainless Steel Law of Evaluation: "The better designed the impact assessment of a social program, the more likely is the resulting estimate of net impact to be zero." - The Brass Law of Evaluation: "The more social programs are designed to change individuals, the more likely the net impact of the program will be zero." - The Zinc Law of Evaluation: "Only those programs that are likely to fail are evaluated."
brudgers 9y ago
To me, the important potential of police body cameras is not in the middle of the Bell Curve. The important effects are in the tails. The routine traffic stop that is a routine traffic stop isn't where a camera matters as much as the routine traffic stop that turns non-routine. The important cases are where it's some civilian's word against one or several officers. It is when the police make a mistake that future training might avoid. And it is when the optics of police behavior turn out to be worse than actual police behavior.
mcguire 9y ago
"“This is the most important empirical study on the impact of police body-worn cameras to date,” said Harlan Yu from Upturn, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit consulting company that studies how technology affects social issues. It was not directly involved in the research. “The results call into question whether police departments should be adopting body-worn cameras, given their high cost.”" The point of police body cameras is to have positive evidence of police behavior. If the presence of cameras reduces the number of reported incidents, that is a nice side effect, but otherwise completely irrelevant.
busted 9y ago
This article is kind of absurd in its assumption, I think it's irresponsible. By saying that you thought police would modify their behavior in response to being filmed, and especially (but not only) by citing a bunch of studies where CRIMINALS changed their behavior in response to being filmed, you are implying that the officers would change their behavior because THEY KNOW THEIR BEHAVIOR IS WRONG and they were doing it anyway. You're essentially saying you are surprised more officers are not actively criminals. The actual problem is more likely that in the vast majority of incidents officers DO NOT KNOW what they're doing is wrong, that for instance they're acting with bias or unreasonably against someone of color in a way they wouldn't act against a white person. The ACTUAL purpose of the body cameras is to create a record that allows ACCOUNTABILITY for officers ("I felt threatened" with no evidence is no longer enough to justify a shooting). Only with that accountability can we start to PROVE that officers are acting unfairly whether they consciously intend to or not, and then fix the problem (with "training" as the article says but with no detail may as well have been saying nothing).
- hvindin 9y ago
  I think the article does, to some extent, address this when it says that the situations that we would most hope for modification in police behaviour are also likely to be the situations where the officer is under significant stress and has defaulted to their most primal response. So while I take your point that police don't think they are doing anything wrong when they misbehave, I think it is more correct to say that police aren't considering moderating their behaviour when they are in those particular situations.
- dade_ 9y ago
  I think the bias of this article against the cameras is obvious. I never thought the purpose of body cams were to improve police behaviour by some psychological effect (though a great benefit if it does), but to provide a record of what actually happened. They are also about protecting officers when they use force that is justified, or other situations where the need to defend their actions.
efficax 9y ago
It's almost like the fact that police face zero consequences for their violence might play a role.
stretchwithme 9y ago
Convincing the criminal to repent would be nice. But catching the criminal is enough.
csomar 9y ago
So my mind has two explanations: 1. Police officers rarely abuse. 2. Police officers abuse and do not care if they are recorded. It is not clear which one is which. 1 makes you think we are in a really good shape. 2 makes you think that it is a very bad situation. If it is either 1 or 2, then it can't be something in between, right?
datenwolf 9y ago
The article starts with this: > "According to decades of research, the presence of other people, cameras or even just a picture of eyes seems to nudge us toward civility" I don't remember where exactly I've read it (I think it might have been the Slate Star Codex), anyway, I recently came across a blog posting (with sources) which highlighted these as one of the examples of "well established" psychological research results which consistently fail to reproduce (I wish I had bookmarked that posting).
wisty 9y ago
> For seven months, just over a thousand Washington, D.C., police officers were randomly assigned cameras — and another thousand were not. Researchers tracked use-of-force incidents, civilian complaints, charging decisions and other outcomes to see if the cameras changed behavior. But on every metric, the effects were too small to be statistically significant. Officers with cameras used force and faced civilian complaints at about the same rates as officers without cameras. ... > Another possibility is that officers without cameras were acting like officers with cameras, simply because they knew other officers had the devices. Or it also causes organisational changes. You can imagine the kind of things high-ranking officers will be telling their reports if they know things are going to be recorded. Is the problem a few bad apples? Or is the problem training and discipline? If it's the later, then cameras can probably do a lot more, by scaring the Inspectors into doing their jobs properly.
RA_Fisher 9y ago
I don't see the link to the Github repo with statistical code. Did anyone see it? Is this open science?
Instructor 9y ago
When the police are trained and accustomed to believe that abuses of power are legitimate behavior, why would they change that behavior with body cams? Regardless, the benefits of body cams go far beyond deterrent. They provide the population with the ability to produce evidence of police abuse and effect institutional change long term via legal action.
linsomniac 9y ago
I'm curious how the new study involved 40x more officers than the Rialto study, but only collected 5x more hours of video. Were the Washington officers using the cameras a tenth as much? The article goes on to say that in Washington they collect about 1,000 hours of footage a day, but previously they say the study involves over 2,000 officers, so this sounds like fairly low usage. It says researchers checked to make sure they were turning on the cameras "when they were supposed to" and "found a high level of compliance". Curious.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  Yeah, this alone discounts the entire study IMO. Police body cameras should be on all the time. They averages 30mins per day per officer: no wonder they get funky results.
LowRezSkyline 9y ago
The way to fix this is to wear your own discreet camera and record them, not the other way around. That way you have accurate, unmodified footage to use against them. The key of course is to make sure the camera is not easily noticed, there are a few on kickstarter that look promising. Who watches the watchmen? We must.

207 points by ddlatham 9y ago

Besides the overall result, another fact that surprised me: The devices vary in price, but the biggest expense is the data-storage cost. In Washington, M.P.D. officers collect about a thousand hours of footage a day. About 40 percent of it is deleted within 90 days, while the rest is to be kept for months, years or decades, depending on the statute of limitations for the charges connected to the footage.

gebeeson 9y ago
Having worked with law enforcement I can expand on this - car dash cam footage takes an impressive amount of storage as well. Given how the cameras are triggered, sometimes the footage is not needed or useful and therefore can be deleted. In other instances, depending on case charges and footage, the video has to be kept until further notice - the word 'indefinitely' is rarely used but that is the implication. Of course the body cams adds to this.
oh_sigh 9y ago
This sounds like a good use case for cold storage like AWS glacier. If you assume 1000 hours of footage would be ~600GB, 1 day of footage would cost ~2.4 cents per month on glacier until you go to retrieve it. Or, 75 cents per month for each month of footage. Most footage would never be watched and eventually purged. I'm not sure how chain of custody would work...perhaps digitally signing the uploads and keeping those signature records locally at the station. But the USG uses AWS, so I'm sure some solution could be found.
- CobrastanJorji 9y ago
  It does sound like a good use case for that, and it is, but you're thinking like a Silicon Valley engineer type, not like a company that sells products to the government: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-16/taser-is-charging-stunning-fees-to-handle-police-video https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-16/taser-is-... Taser probably just puts the videos in AWS or something, but the markup is obscene.

jandrese 9y ago

It probably shouldn't be that big of a surprise. Police officers are almost entirely decent people that shouldn't feel the need to change their behavior just because they're being recorded. Regular citizens would already be on their best behavior around cops, the camera doesn't change much. I think people get a skewed perception of the police force from a relatively small number of highly publicized incidents. Counter option: The DC cops are so brazen that they don't even care if they're being caught on film. This doesn't seem likely, since it would be such an easy payday for some hungry defense lawyer.

crdoconnor 9y ago
>I think people get a skewed perception of the police force from a relatively small number of highly publicized incidents. ...who receive lots of back up from other police officers, superiors and the law.
losvedir 9y ago
Surprised to see this downvoted - it was my initial thought as well. If most cops are decent and doing what they think is right, then that wouldn't change just because they're wearing bodycams. That said, I still think bodycams are a great idea. I hadn't heard justification of them based on improving some aggregate statistics before. Instead, I've always thought they were good for those particularly difficult "he said / she said" cases that capture public attention.
- gph 9y ago
  >Instead, I've always thought they were good for those particularly difficult "he said / she said" cases that capture public attention. I agree, but at what price point would you say it's worth it? In principle I want bodycams, but with this new study it's making me wonder if pragmatically it's really worth spending millions of dollars each year just for a handful of difficult 'he said / she said' cases to be better resolved. Probably it still is given that these small handful of cases get the biggest media attention / public backlash that hurts the image of the police. In that sense bodycams can almost be thought of as a public relations expense.

givinguflac 9y ago

Personally I think police could not only solve their storage problem, but also create a revenue stream and public good will: by simply storing the video on a public service like YouTube. It also increases transparency though, which is probably why it will never happen.

eric_h 9y ago
There will be footage recorded by those cameras that will drastically impinge on the privacy of civilians should it be shared publicly. It's a nice idea, but I think it has some pretty significant potential for downsides.
- jMyles 9y ago
  I find this idea very toxic. If the state can send an agent somewhere, then that place and the goings-on that were witnessed are a matter of public record. If that isn't so, and isn't sacred, then we're saying that secrecy in policing is normal, and that goes against hundreds of years of progress in the common-law tradition. In order for people to enjoy the kind of privacy you discuss, we need to have non-state support services that are completely disconnected from the matter of enforcement of th e law.
  - taeric 9y ago
    This is trivial to argue against, though. Officer heads to restroom to help patient that is having seizures. Heck, officer heads anywhere to help citizen having seizures. (Substitute any of a number of incidents and the argument remains mostly the same.) Is it public record that it happened? Yes. Should it be shielded from anyone knowing? I don't think so. Should it be publicly broadcast? Almost certainly not.
    - jMyles 9y ago
      The underlying question here is: what does enforcement of the public ordinances have to do with medical aid? Why has our society conflated those? Why has our society conflated law enforcement with emergency response at all? What do these two things have to do with each other? That's the problem. The fact that we're talking seriously about affording public policing a sphere of secrecy is just a symptom of that problem.

theptip 9y ago

TL;DR: Previous sociology research had suggested that filming people makes them more civil. New research on fails to replicate this result in the context of police body cameras. Doesn't seem like a very interesting result to me; I hadn't previously heard of the "calming effect" as a reason to use body cameras. The primary reason to use cameras is to increase accountability, so that police officers are less able to get away with murder, planting evidence, being overtly racist, etc.

secfirstmd 9y ago
Also less false allegations against them
alexandercrohde 9y ago
Exactly. (How is this at the bottom? I read every single response to this thread waiting to find somebody pointing this out.)
gowld 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(legal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(legal)
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
Cities have up to hundreds of autonomous precincts to comprise a single police department. Every single city and municipality has its own separate police department. States pass laws allowing for overlapping jurisdictions at their discretion. No study about "police officers" is going to address that. Elevating these studies to that level is going to continually get conflicting results. No person knows what a random internal police department's memo on what justified force is. Nobody will know if some local municipality had just reviewed and changed that standard, or if they are currently in a bout of actual corruption.

whack 9y ago

Before people start wildly speculating, it's worth considering the many good explanations and interpretations suggested in the article: One hypothesis is that officers got used to the cameras and became desensitized to them. But the researchers saw no difference in behavior during the initial phase, when the cameras were new. (The researchers also checked the data to make sure officers were turning their cameras on when they were supposed to, and found a very high level of compliance.) Another possibility is that officers without cameras were acting like officers with cameras, simply because they knew other officers had the devices. An equally plausible explanation has to do with fear: In Washington, police officers are instructed to turn on their cameras whenever they answer a call or encounter the public in a law-enforcement context. The kinds of situations that might lead to civilian complaints or use-of-force incidents are high-stress encounters. When frightened, humans tend to act on automatic fear responses (or, in the case of good police officers in an ideal world, training). “It’s a lot to ask, psychologically speaking, to not only remember the camera is on but to moderate your behavior,” said Mr. Yokum, the head of the Lab @ DC. Finally, cameras may have had less impact in Washington, D.C., because the police department there has already had to confront excessive-force problems. After a devastating 1998 Washington Post series revealed that the city’s police department had shot and killed more people per resident in the 1990s than any other police force in a large American city, the Department of Justice entered into a memorandum of agreement with D.C. to reform its policing. “We went through a transformation with regard to use of force when Justice came in here,” Chief Newsham said. Cities that lack such accountability in their police culture may find cameras more effective, under this theory. (The Rialto Police Department had been reeling from a series of scandals when the Rialto study showed a large impact from cameras.) Even if cameras do not reduce violent encounters, they can still offer other kinds of benefits: for training, or to hold a rogue officer accountable after the fact. To Chief Newsham, the cameras’ primary benefit is to improve relations with the community. “The transparency and trust that the community has, knowing your department is recording the interactions, I don’t think you can undervalue that,” he said.

zzalpha 9y ago
Funny, I noticed an absence of a far more cynical explanation that made me immediately doubt how balanced the article was: if cops know that the footage is difficult to obtain or can be easily suppressed, deleted, or otherwise buried, or if the legal system is already heavily biased in favour of law enforcement such that body cam footage rarely changes trial outcomes, then body cams don't actually contribute to additional accountability and therefore there's no reason to change behaviours. tl;dr I see no reason to believe body cams have actually resulted in greater transparency or accountability due to offsetting institutional factors.

NuSkooler 9y ago

Somehow I'm not surprised. Incidents are now caught on camera and spread around the news & social media. Yet, in a large portion of the cases where the cops are clearly in the wrong they get a slap on the wrist if that. There is no real incentive to change their behavior camera or not.

occultist_throw 9y ago
Indeed not. The prosecution is on the Cops' side. The prosecution decides how vigorously they go after people in Grand Jury and open court. The Judicial system is on the Cops' side, even if during a jury trial they give words that "cops are just like everyone else" - they aren't. It isn't a thin blue line. It's a big fat highlighter blue bar. The people, vs the Judicial System. And they're the ones that make and enforce the rules.

vladislav 9y ago

1) The feedback loop is not just being filmed on the job, but the repercussions of being filmed while doing something illegal and being punished for it. It might take time for this to sink in, especially for the bad apples. 2) Having body cams on all police officers simply makes sense, regardless of the immediate effect. Knowing exactly (or more about) what happened when a citizen armed on behalf of the state interacts with regular citizens is an obvious priority. Even if enforcing body cams doesn't lead to a reduction of police crime, it will certainly lead to more legal action against police crime, which is typically stifled by police buddy tactics.

rocqua 9y ago
There is a decent privacy argument to be made against body cams. Not just for the officers themselves, but also for the people approached by the officers. In many cases, when police need to get involved people aren't showing their best sides. Recordings of that kind of stuff are rather sensitive. You gotta remember that body cams can't just be used against corrupt police, they can just as easily be used against the public. Consider how a closeted gay person reacts when caught drunk with a boyfriend and how the presence of a camera effects that.
- comicjk 9y ago
  This seems obvious to me, but maybe it isn't based on the implementations of body cameras I'm hearing about: the police should not have access to the videos! A camera should automatically upload its contents to off-site encrypted servers, with the courts having sole access to the decryption keys. No one should be able to access the data without a court order. It's strange to me that, when faced with problems of official power vs privacy, people never seem to remember the idea of warrants, which are baked into our legal system and have been used to address privacy problems for centuries.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    Why shouldn't the public have access at least to the videos filmed in public?

djyaz1200 9y ago

Run this study again and put a prominent blinking light on the camera and I bet the result is different. It's not the fact that you are being watched that changes behavior, it's being aware of the fact that you are being watched. This is why many stores show you the video of yourself as you walk in. The mere presence of cameras is not enough... people have to be reminded they are there.

BugsJustFindMe 9y ago

> Researchers tracked use-of-force incidents, This is literally impossible. Researchers tracked reports of use-of-force incidents, which is factually rather different. If you hypothetically have fewer incidents and simultaneously higher percentage reporting of incidents when people are able to see if there's probable evidence supporting their complaints (i.e. the visible presence of a body camera), you could end up with a similar number of reports. This would be especially true when reported incident counts are percentagewise quite low relative to total encounters. I'm not saying that this is true or even likely. I'm saying that it sounds like they didn't actually learn what they are saying they learned, and if true then that cavalier lack of contemplation is very upsetting. > The primary outcomes of interest were documented uses of force and civilian complaints The DC/Baltimore area has had some recent high profile falsification of evidence accidentally caught on camera cases. I notice that it's not discussed. Maybe catching when police plant evidence is a legitimately worthwhile endeavor. Besides, we already know that gathering evidence of malpractice is irrelevant if no meaningful punishment ever results from it.

dpark 9y ago
> This is literally impossible. Researchers tracked reports of use-of-force incidents, which is factually rather different. This is unfair. You're complaining that they didn't do something that you admit is impossible. They measured essentially everything they could.
- BugsJustFindMe 9y ago
  I'm not upset about what they measured. I'm upset about what they claim they learned from it and about the kinds of causation-related lemmata they (erroneously) assert in the report.
  - dpark 9y ago
    Firstly, you're critiquing a study based on a journalist's write-up about it. Secondly, you're essentially making an epistemological argument. You could apply your core argument to almost anything and come up with the assertion that the research is invalid. "Researchers tracked use-of-force incidents" -> "Researchers tracked reports of use-of-force incidents, which is factually rather different. "Researchers observed bosons at 125GeV" -> "Researchers observed detections of bosons at 125GeV, which is factually rather different." This is merely a pedantic argument that things are not truly knowable. But whether the Higgs boson exists and whether body cameras reduce police violence are not unknowable questions. Even if we cannot directly measure, the indirect measures are meaningful to the questions. Now, if there's something else that the researchers should measure, then that would be useful criticism.

mtalantikite 9y ago

I only briefly scanned the published paper [1], but I saw no mention made about whether or not the officers knew this study was happening to their teams. Does anyone know if the study was blind? [1] http://bwc.thelab.dc.gov/static/files/supplementary-materials.pdf http://bwc.thelab.dc.gov/static/files/supplementary-material...

mcguire 9y ago
Were the officers who were not filming also not wearing cameras?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Overtonwindow 9y ago

I think for police cameras, and the idea of being watched as a catalyst for better behavior, the focus of behavior modification is misplaced. IMO police in America have become separated from the rest of society, through hubris, militarization, or some perceived "us versus them" thinking. They appear to see their behavior, regardless of what that behavior is, as protecting the public, and stopping others from breaking the law. The police as an institution have placed themselves in a sphere of superiority, not beholden to others. We must work to bring the idea of police officer closer to that of citizen, stop the militarization, stop the us versus them thinking, and teach officers that they are to peaceful officers that serve and protect, not an authoritarian paramilitary force, immune from society's laws and norms.

will_brown 9y ago

I was recently the victim of an armed kidnapping, escaping only by jumping out of my own car from the driver seat while in gear with the gunman in the passenger seat. By the time the police arrived, my attacker escaped in my car and the first words out of the sergeants mouth was “cut the crap, quit jerking us around, what really happened?” Sure enough I was in a jurisdiction that only two months prior was equipped with vest cameras (due to community outrage over an execution style killing of a 21 year old black male pulled over with a phone the police thought was a gun). As an officer of the court myself I was beyond dismayed and obtained 2 different copies of police video from the scene...wouldn’t you know both officers vest videos were redacted and specifically edited out the audio of the sergeant’s first words to me and the sergeant’s video didn’t exist. The dvds even say redacted right on them, and I knew before I even watched, which is funny because I had to pay ~$100 for the video, basically paying for the time it took for the department to watch and redact the 1 part I really wanted. How would such a system have any effect of police officer behavior?

cryptonector 9y ago
Fixing this will have to be the next step. The first step was getting the body cams. Also, you could probably file a suit to get the unredacted video, and you could make a big stink about this. That's how you get to the next step.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  I would be shocked if the unredacted video still exists.
  - fao_ 9y ago
    It would be illegal otherwise, wouldn't it? Redaction of evidence
    - djrogers 9y ago
      You would have to prove a) that it was evidence of a crime, and b) the police had reason to believe or know it was such. In the absence of laws requiring full transparency and access to body cam footage, the body cams are just likely to be abused.

gremlinsinc 9y ago

See the difference is cops - get away with anything/almost anything. So without a 'penalty' or fear factor for doing wrong, what's the point if they do, other than possible public humiliation?

floatingatoll 9y ago

Is the Washington DC police district known to be relatively free of the corruption that plagues e.g. Oakland and Chicago? It's possible they measured a district that's already "constantly under observation", and thus detected no significant behavioral shifts.

djrogers 9y ago
If you read the article you would find that very issue addressed: "After a devastating 1998 Washington Post series revealed that the city’s police department had shot and killed more people per resident in the 1990s than any other police force in a large American city, the Department of Justice entered into a memorandum of agreement with D.C. to reform its policing. “We went through a transformation with regard to use of force when Justice came in here,” Chief Newsham said. Cities that lack such accountability in their police culture may find cameras more effective, under this theory. "

gwern 9y ago

Rossi's Metallic Laws of social program evaluation ( https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/1987-rossi https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/1987-rossi ): - The Iron Law of Evaluation: "The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero." - The Stainless Steel Law of Evaluation: "The better designed the impact assessment of a social program, the more likely is the resulting estimate of net impact to be zero." - The Brass Law of Evaluation: "The more social programs are designed to change individuals, the more likely the net impact of the program will be zero." - The Zinc Law of Evaluation: "Only those programs that are likely to fail are evaluated."

brudgers 9y ago

To me, the important potential of police body cameras is not in the middle of the Bell Curve. The important effects are in the tails. The routine traffic stop that is a routine traffic stop isn't where a camera matters as much as the routine traffic stop that turns non-routine. The important cases are where it's some civilian's word against one or several officers. It is when the police make a mistake that future training might avoid. And it is when the optics of police behavior turn out to be worse than actual police behavior.

mcguire 9y ago

"“This is the most important empirical study on the impact of police body-worn cameras to date,” said Harlan Yu from Upturn, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit consulting company that studies how technology affects social issues. It was not directly involved in the research. “The results call into question whether police departments should be adopting body-worn cameras, given their high cost.”" The point of police body cameras is to have positive evidence of police behavior. If the presence of cameras reduces the number of reported incidents, that is a nice side effect, but otherwise completely irrelevant.

busted 9y ago

This article is kind of absurd in its assumption, I think it's irresponsible. By saying that you thought police would modify their behavior in response to being filmed, and especially (but not only) by citing a bunch of studies where CRIMINALS changed their behavior in response to being filmed, you are implying that the officers would change their behavior because THEY KNOW THEIR BEHAVIOR IS WRONG and they were doing it anyway. You're essentially saying you are surprised more officers are not actively criminals. The actual problem is more likely that in the vast majority of incidents officers DO NOT KNOW what they're doing is wrong, that for instance they're acting with bias or unreasonably against someone of color in a way they wouldn't act against a white person. The ACTUAL purpose of the body cameras is to create a record that allows ACCOUNTABILITY for officers ("I felt threatened" with no evidence is no longer enough to justify a shooting). Only with that accountability can we start to PROVE that officers are acting unfairly whether they consciously intend to or not, and then fix the problem (with "training" as the article says but with no detail may as well have been saying nothing).

hvindin 9y ago
I think the article does, to some extent, address this when it says that the situations that we would most hope for modification in police behaviour are also likely to be the situations where the officer is under significant stress and has defaulted to their most primal response. So while I take your point that police don't think they are doing anything wrong when they misbehave, I think it is more correct to say that police aren't considering moderating their behaviour when they are in those particular situations.
dade_ 9y ago
I think the bias of this article against the cameras is obvious. I never thought the purpose of body cams were to improve police behaviour by some psychological effect (though a great benefit if it does), but to provide a record of what actually happened. They are also about protecting officers when they use force that is justified, or other situations where the need to defend their actions.

efficax 9y ago

It's almost like the fact that police face zero consequences for their violence might play a role.

stretchwithme 9y ago

Convincing the criminal to repent would be nice. But catching the criminal is enough.

csomar 9y ago

So my mind has two explanations: 1. Police officers rarely abuse. 2. Police officers abuse and do not care if they are recorded. It is not clear which one is which. 1 makes you think we are in a really good shape. 2 makes you think that it is a very bad situation. If it is either 1 or 2, then it can't be something in between, right?

datenwolf 9y ago

The article starts with this: > "According to decades of research, the presence of other people, cameras or even just a picture of eyes seems to nudge us toward civility" I don't remember where exactly I've read it (I think it might have been the Slate Star Codex), anyway, I recently came across a blog posting (with sources) which highlighted these as one of the examples of "well established" psychological research results which consistently fail to reproduce (I wish I had bookmarked that posting).

wisty 9y ago

> For seven months, just over a thousand Washington, D.C., police officers were randomly assigned cameras — and another thousand were not. Researchers tracked use-of-force incidents, civilian complaints, charging decisions and other outcomes to see if the cameras changed behavior. But on every metric, the effects were too small to be statistically significant. Officers with cameras used force and faced civilian complaints at about the same rates as officers without cameras. ... > Another possibility is that officers without cameras were acting like officers with cameras, simply because they knew other officers had the devices. Or it also causes organisational changes. You can imagine the kind of things high-ranking officers will be telling their reports if they know things are going to be recorded. Is the problem a few bad apples? Or is the problem training and discipline? If it's the later, then cameras can probably do a lot more, by scaring the Inspectors into doing their jobs properly.

RA_Fisher 9y ago

I don't see the link to the Github repo with statistical code. Did anyone see it? Is this open science?

Instructor 9y ago

When the police are trained and accustomed to believe that abuses of power are legitimate behavior, why would they change that behavior with body cams? Regardless, the benefits of body cams go far beyond deterrent. They provide the population with the ability to produce evidence of police abuse and effect institutional change long term via legal action.

linsomniac 9y ago

I'm curious how the new study involved 40x more officers than the Rialto study, but only collected 5x more hours of video. Were the Washington officers using the cameras a tenth as much? The article goes on to say that in Washington they collect about 1,000 hours of footage a day, but previously they say the study involves over 2,000 officers, so this sounds like fairly low usage. It says researchers checked to make sure they were turning on the cameras "when they were supposed to" and "found a high level of compliance". Curious.

abritinthebay 9y ago
Yeah, this alone discounts the entire study IMO. Police body cameras should be on all the time. They averages 30mins per day per officer: no wonder they get funky results.

LowRezSkyline 9y ago

The way to fix this is to wear your own discreet camera and record them, not the other way around. That way you have accurate, unmodified footage to use against them. The key of course is to make sure the camera is not easily noticed, there are a few on kickstarter that look promising. Who watches the watchmen? We must.