A Big Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations

Recently, a study was done on police body cameras in the United States. For 7 months over a thousand Washington D.C police officers were randomly assigned cameras and another thousand were not. Researchers tracked civilian complaints, use of force incidents, charging decisions and other outcomes to see if the cameras changed behavior. The results of the study showed officers that had cameras used force and had civilian complaints at about the same rates as the officers without the cameras did. Many people think that cameras have the ability to make changes in the way police do their job. In 2014, after the police shooting of Michael Brown many police officials turned to cameras as a way of reducing violent encounters. By 2015, 95% of police departments reported they were using body cameras. That's why most people think that cameras have a way of changing the way police do their jobs but they honestly don't. The results from this study proved that police officers that had cameras used force at about the same rate as the officers without the camera. This was very shocking to me because I thought that cameras would make officers change their behavior. I thought most people would act differently when they know they are being watched by cameras.

The link to the study
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/upshot/a-big-test-of-police-body-cameras-defies-expectations.html?smid=tw-share