The Effect of Police Body-Worn Cameras on Use of Force and Citizens’ Complaints Against the Police: A Randomized Controlled Trial

TL;DR: The question is: do body-worn-cameras reduce the prevalence of use-of-force and/or citizens’ complaints against the police?

Abstract: Police use-of-force continues to be a major source of international concern, inviting interest from academics and practitioners alike Whether justified or unnecessary/excessive, the exercise of power by the police can potentially tarnish their relationship with the community Police misconduct can translate into complaints against the police, which carry large economic and social costs The question we try to answer is: do body-worn-cameras reduce the prevalence of use-of-force and/or citizens’ complaints against the police? We empirically tested the use of body-worn-cameras by measuring the effect of videotaping police–public encounters on incidents of police use-of-force and complaints, in randomized-controlled settings Over 12 months, we randomly-assigned officers to “experimental-shifts” during which they were equipped with body-worn HD cameras that recorded all contacts with the public and to “control-shifts” without the cameras (n = 988) We nominally defined use-of-force, both unnecessary/excessive and reasonable, as a non-desirable response in police–public encounters We estimate the causal effect of the use of body-worn-videos on the two outcome variables using both between-group differences using a Poisson regression model as well as before-after estimates using interrupted time-series analyses We found that the likelihood of force being used in control conditions were roughly twice those in experimental conditions Similarly, a pre/post analysis of use-of-force and complaints data also support this result: the number of complaints filed against officers dropped from 07 complaints per 1,000 contacts to 007 per 1,000 contacts We discuss the findings in terms of theory, research methods, policy and future avenues of research on body-worn-videos

Summary

INTRODUCTION

• In recent years the use of police body-worn-cameras by police has received extensive media attention.
• Which tested the effect of body-worn-cameras in Rialto across 12 months.the authors.
• The study focused specifically on use-of-force and citizens’ complaints, which were hypothesized to be affected by officers wearing cameras, given the possible deterrent effect of the devices on noncompliant behavior.
• The authors then move on to describe the theoretical grounds for the hypothesized effect of cameras.
• The authors observed the number of complaints, incidents of use-of-force, and the number of contacts between police officers and the public, in the years and months preceding the trial (in order to establish a baseline) and during the 12 months of the experiment.

POLICE USE-OF-FORCE

• Police use-of-force has received considerable attention in various disciplines.
• This scholastic interest reflects significant investment by practitioners and decision-makers in better understanding the ways in which law enforcement institutions exercise their power, and how such powers can be managed.
• In democratic civilizations, the police are expected by the public to use force when the situation justifies the use of “reasonable” power “necessary” to achieve “legitimate purposes” (Alpert and Smith 1994; Bittner 1970).
• Collectively, this line of theorization purports that the police are responsible for safeguarding and protecting the general social order, which includes protecting the safety of the citizens and other police officers.
• These two types of situations are argued to damage the relationship of the police with the community that they are expected “to protect and serve” (Reiss 1968; Skolnick and Fyfe 1993; Worden 1996).

EXPLAINING POLICE USE-OF-FORCE

• In the present study the authors focus on three strands of research that purport to explain police use- of-force: situational, psychological and organizational.
• The ability to “endure” some stressful situations was found to be associated with personality types, while some police officers tend to accept some forms of disrespect but not others (Engel et al 2000).
• The authors read this body of instructive literature as suggesting that some psychological variables are important in any study of police use-of-force.
• Certain institutional and subcultural codes make police agencies particularly resistant to cultural changes; indeed, as Skolnick (2008:37) observed, the “unrecorded code [of silence] has been noted as a feature of policing across continents, wherever commissions of inquiry have investigated police corruption”.

MEASURING USE-OF-FORCE

• One possible way to assess levels of police force was introduced in the “use-of-force continuum” (see review in Garner et al 1995), and is utilized by many police agencies worldwide as a standardized tool for measuring responses to varied types of situations.
• Even more difficult to define is at what point the useof-force is either “unnecessary” or “excessive” (see Atherley and Hickman 2014; Alpert and Smith 1994).
• Garner et al (2002) who found that prevalence can increase to more than 58% of police-public encounters.

CITIZENS COMPLAINTS AGAINST THE POLICE

• One way to measure police (mis)conduct and how the public view police actions is through the analysis of complaints lodged against police officers – even though the rate of complaints is usually very low, compared to the number of interactions between the police and members of the public.
• Subsequently, complaint procedures were designed by most police agencies to investigate these complaints of officer misconduct and punish guilty officers - although Walker (1997) suggests that punishment is often not the goal of most complainants.
• Researchers have also used complaint databases to assess various types of legitimacy and justice-related outcomes.
• Braga et al (2008a), for example, analyzed police complaint data in Boston as a proxy of community complaints against the police.
• Whether complaints are in fact justified and can be substantiated has always been a matter of contention.

CAMERAS AS A DETERRENCE STIMULUS TO MANAGE POLICE USE-OF-FORCE

• Several lines of research across many disciplines suggest that most species alter their behavior once aware they are being observed (Chartrand and Bargh 1999; Dzieweczynski et al 2006; Jones and Nisbett 1971).
• Paradigmatically, these cues are more broadly explored under deterrence theory.
• An extensive body of recent rigorous research across several categories of human behavior has since shown that when certainty of apprehension for wrongdoing is “high” and when the severity of sanction is substantial, socially and morallyunacceptable acts are dramatically less likely to occur (Von Hirsch et al 1999; Nagin 2013).
• A meta-analysis of 35 rigorous studies has found that, compared with controls, the relative reduction in the proportion of vehicles speeding was up to 65% and up to 44% for fatal and serious injury crashes (Wilson et al 2010).

HYPOTHESES

• As the literature review suggests, the most ubiquitous type of camera – mobile cameras – have been virtually ignored.
• Cameras are thus likely to have a “self-awareness effect” that would both deter the police officer from reacting with excessive or unnecessary force, and cool down the “aggressive demeanor” of the suspect (or deter the police from interpreting demeanor in this way).
• Police-public encounters become more transparent and the curtain of silence that protects misconduct can more easily be unveiled, which makes misconduct less likely.
• In summary, deterrence theory presupposes that effective deterrence requires self- consciousness of being observed.

RESEARCH SETTINGS

• The authors tested the effect of body-worn-cameras on incidents of use-of-force and citizens’ complaints against the police in a randomized-controlled field-trial in Rialto, California.
• The entire population of Rialto Police Department frontline officers participated in the experiment (n=54), though the authors consider the shift to be the unit-of-analysis (see below).
• Each shift consists of approximately ten armed officers who patrol the streets of Rialto and interact with offenders, victims, witnesses and members of the public.
• Methodologically, planning a treatment group of 27 experimental and 27 control officers would have resulted in an underpowered study.
• Shifts are also easy to administer in an experimental context because there is a set number of shifts in any given week, and the number of patrolling officers within every shift is stable and predictable.

PROCEDURE, RANDOM ALLOCATION AND STATISTICAL POWER

• Starting on February 13th 2012 and running for 12 months, the experiment consisted of randomly assigning all police shifts to either experimental or control conditions.
• “Control-shifts” consisted of shifts in which officers were instructed not to wear the HD cameras.
• Similarly, officers regularly encounter ‘the usual suspects’ on patrol, meaning that there is some dependence between shifts in terms of “interactees”.
• One concern with experimental assignment is equivalence of treatment and control units.
• Still, in Table 2 the authors assessed the extent of balance between the number of shifts allocated and days of the week post-randomization, which were both statistically non-significant.

APPARATUS

• The authors collaborated with Taser Inc.© to provide all frontline officers with their HD body-worn- cameras.
• Weighing 108g and small enough to place on the officer’s shirt pocket, the camera systems were affixed to the collar and could always be seen by people who came into contact with the police – although in order to make sure people were aware of cameras, officers informed ‘interactees’ with that they were being videotaped.
• The units were water resistant, videoed in color, with a battery lasting for at least 12 hours, making the apparatus ideal for the shift patterns of Rialto Police.
• All data from the cameras were collated using a web-based computerized video management system developed by evidence.
• The software tracked and inventoried all Taser Inc.© video cameras evidence.

Use-Of-Force

• Rialto Police Department used a system called Blue Team to track “recorded” use-of-force incidents.
• The authors operationalized the “use-of-force” dependent variable as whether or not force was used in a given shift.
• The authors acknowledge that police software cannot “measure” the use-of-force, and that it is nearly always up to the individual officer to account for those incidents where force was used.
• If three police officers use force on one suspect in one event, it would be registered as “one use-of-force.”.
• For this information, the authors relied on what the officers had written down (again, in Blue Team), but this is not necessarily an objective measure.

Citizen Complaints

• In some ways, complaints compliment data on use-of-force (Pate et al 1993).
• It is common practice for virtually all police agencies to have clear guidelines for citizens to file complaints against officers, though the rates of complaints vary dramatically between different forces.
• Nevertheless, analysis of departmental and citizens’ complaints against police officers was shown to provide somewhat reliable estimates of use-of-force (McCluskey and Terrill 2005:513).
• True, citizens can be very poor judges of what constitutes “force” and particularly so when it comes to excessive force, but these complaints do provide a glimpse into what the public perceives as “force”.
• Rialto Police Department tracked complaints against officers with software called IA-Pro. Formally, the system records citizens’ complaints where the reporting party has filed a grievance for alleged misconduct or what they perceive as poor performance.

Contacts with the public

• The authors measured the total number of contacts between the police and the public in each arm.
• Any non-casual interaction with the public was recorded on the Department’s computer-aided dispatch system (CAD).
• These included attending calls-for-service, formal advices given to individuals, collecting evidence and statements during any type of investigation and the like.
• 000 police-public contacts.the authors.

BASELINE DATA

• Table 3 below lists the outcome variables at baseline, up to three years prior to the experiment.
• As shown, use-of-force is a relatively rare event, with approximately 65 incidents per year, or 1.46 incidents for every 1,000 police-public contacts.
• Similarly, complaints lodged by citizens against police-officers are very infrequent, with 24 grievances filed against officers in the year prior to the experiment (about 0.7 for every 1,000 contacts).
• Police-public contacts data show that, on average, police officers interacted with members of the public about 3,600 timesper-month, or approximately 42 recorded contacts per shift.

STATISTICAL PROCEDURE

• The authors employed three analytical approaches to analyze the outcomes.
• First, the authors used a Poisson model to assess differences between experimental and control groups.
• Group assignment (“experimental shifts” [0]/“control shifts” [1]) was set as an explanatory variable, and the dependent variable was whether or not use-of-force occurred.
• Second, for each outcome variable, the authors assessed the standardized mean difference for the rates of use-of-force incidents per shift.
• This quasi-experimental approach was used in order to indicate how the entire police organization responded to wearing the cameras; assessing the city-wide impact of the trial by comparing the data before and after the implementation of bodyworn-cameras.

Use-of-force

• During the experimental period a total of 25 incidents of police use-of-force were recorded by Rialto Police Department, of which 17 occurred during control shifts and 8 during experimental shifts.
• These represent a mean rate of 0.78 and 0.33 incidents per 1,000 policepublic contacts, respectively.
• Meaning that the incident rate in the control condition is roughly twice that of the control condition (Table 4).
• Similarly, when the authors measure the magnitude of the difference in terms of rates per 1,000 encounters (dividing the number of incidents by the total number of contacts in each arm of the experiment), the effect size was statistically significant {SMD=0.140; [95% CI (.015)-(.265)]}.
• Poisson is appropriate here because each event has a small probability in each shift, and there are many shifts.

Citizens’ Complaints

• In terms of complaints against officers, the between-groups treatment effect was not statistically significant,10 largely because of the overall low occurrence in both treatment and control conditions.
• The authors observed only three complaints in total - one complaint lodged for an incident that occurred during control conditions and two for incidents that occurred during treatment conditions (all three occurred in August and September).
• The authors did, however, observe a significant, overall reduction of citizens’ complaints, from 24 complaints filed in the 12 months before the trial to three during the trial period.
• These reductions are mirrored by the interrupted time series model (Table 6), which resulted in a significant estimated parameter for the experimental phase of (-1.750; SE=.665; p <0.01).

DISCUSSION

• For the first time, the effect of mobile cameras on police use- of-force and citizens’ complaints.the authors.
• In practical terms, the study provides law enforcement agencies with a methodology that may substantially reduce force responses, as well as reducing the incidence of complaints.
• The authors therefore envisage that body-worn-cameras may noticeably affect police-public encounters.
• There are clearly more shifts than police officers, which increases the statistical power of any test.

JUST ANOTHER HAWTHORNE EFFECT?

• Somewhat crudely, the authors could argue that it is difficult to attribute the reduction in both use- of-force and complaints to anything but the effect of the cameras.
• In terms of the Hawthorne and John Henry effects, the authors acknowledge that interference risks potentially characterize their study.
• If ignored, SUTVA violations have the possibility of adding bias to estimated treatment effects, and the bias can go in either a positive or negative direction (Sinclair 2009:3).
• Now let us return to the Hawthorne bias: changing participants’ behavior because they are being observed, despite any treatment effect (work environment, etc.).
• Therefore, if the same officer is in the habit of responding with a particular “response dosage” to certain police-public interactions, then it is likely that he or she would spill-over such reaction between the study units – that is, from one encounter to the next.

ESTIMATING THE COSTS AND BENEFITS OF BODY-WORN-CAMERAS

• Combining costs data from the experiment with figures from Finn (2001), the Minneapolis Civilian Review Authority (1997), Walker et al (2002) and Metropolitan Police court settlements (BBC, 11th May, 2012) the authors have crudely estimated the dollar benefit-cost ratio to be approximately 4:1 (details available as a supplement to this article).
• 12 That said, there are wider social and ethical costs to using these cameras.
• Much like surgery, football or acting, the footage recorded by police body-worn-videos can be used to “coach” police officers, about how they conduct themselves.
• Historically, evidence given by police officers in court against defendants – particularly testimonies of response officers – carried tremendous weight.

RESEARCH LIMITATIONS

• Thus far the authors have ignored how cameras affected the citizens the police came into contact with, meaning that their analyses do not directly address the demeanor hypothesis.
• Whether police useof-force – justified or unwarranted, excessive or proportional, reasonable or unreasonable – is a function of suspects’ demeanor, or whether it is caused by unprofessional or inexperienced officers, the circumstances in which use-of-force occurred have changed, and resulted in what can be interpreted as a socially desirable response: force-free police-public encounters.
• This model may work well in a relatively limited force and when the “pracademic” involved in the study is the director/chief of police, but the effect of body-worn videos may not work in the same way when the pracademic is less influential in the organization.

CONCLUSION

• Similarly, the use-of-force by police, particularly if excessive, has a lasting effect on public perceptions of police and police-community relations.
• The authors have reported results from the first trial in the world to assess the effects of police body-worn-cameras on use-of-force and complaints against the police.
• To handle the small number of officers in Rialto Police, the authors took 14 We argue that experiments that allow treatment-providers full discretion about when to give or not to deliver the treatment(s) - and with what dosage levels – are generally poor designs.
• Moreover, even if the study results in significant results, the magnitude of the treatment compared to control conditions would be either inflated or deflated and therefore misleading, depending on how the treatment-providers decided to contaminate the treatment delivery.

Figures

Table 1:

Table 4: Generalized Linear Model with Poisson distribution and log link for use-of-force (n=988)

Table 5: Time Series ARIMA Model for use-of-force before/during experimental period (t=24)

Table 6: Time Series ARIMA Model for complaints before/during experimental period (t=24)

Table 2: Trial measures by treatment allocation

Table 3: Use-of-force, Citizens Complaints and Police-Public Raw Figures – Baseline and Experimental Raw Data

Full text

POLICE BODY-WORN CAMERAS
1
Title:
THE EFFECT OF POLICE BODY-WORN CAMERAS ON USE OF FORCE AND
CITIZENS’ COMPLAINTS AGAINST THE POLICE: A RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED
TRIAL
Barak Ariel
†
William Farrar
±
Alex Sutherland
*
† PhD, Assistant Professor, Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, Hebrew University, Mount
Scopus, Jerusalem 91905 Israel, +972.2.5882502; barak.ariel@mail.huji.ac.il and Lecturer in
Experimental Criminology, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue
Cambridge CB3 9DA UK, +44.1223.767378, ba285@cam.ac.uk
± Chief, Rialto Police Department, California and Cantab. Police Executive Programme, Institute
of Criminology, University of Cambridge, ltlojack@aol.com
* Ph.D, Research Leader, Communities, Safety & Justice RAND Europe, Westbrook Centre,
Milton Road, Cambridge, CB4 1YG, United Kingdom; +44 1223 353 329; Research
Associate & Member of Violence Research Centre Institute of Criminology, University of
Cambridge; Email: as2140@cam.ac.uk;
We wish to alphabetically thank Phillip Dawid, Badi Hasisi, Daniel Nagin, David Weisburd, Joel
Garner, Justice Tankebe, Lawrence Sherman, Neil Wain, Paul and Patricia Brantingham, and the
anonymous reviewers of earlier drafts of this manuscript for their tremendously helpful comments.
Funding for this research was granted by Rialto Police and the Jerry Lee Centre of Experimental
Criminology

POLICE BODY-WORN CAMERAS
2
THE EFFECT OF POLICE BODY-WORN-CAMERAS ON USE-OF-FORCE AND
CITIZENS’ COMPLAINTS AGAINST THE POLICE: A RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED
TRIAL
ABSTRACT
Objective: Police use-of-force continues to be a major source of international concern,
inviting interest by academics and practitioners alike. Whether justified or
unnecessary/excessive, the exercise of power by the police can potentially tarnish their
relationship with the community. Police misconduct can translate into complaints against the
police, which carry large economic and social costs. The question we try to answer is: do body-
worn-cameras reduce the prevalence of use-of-force and/or citizens’ complaints against the
police?
Methods: We empirically tested the use of body-worn-cameras by measuring the effect of
videotaping police-public encounters on incidents of police use-of-force and complaints, in
randomized-controlled settings. Over 12 months, we randomly-assigned officers to
“experimental-shifts” during which they were equipped with body-worn HD cameras that
recorded all contacts with the public and to “control-shifts” without the cameras (n=988). We
nominally defined use-of-force, both unnecessary/excessive and reasonable, as a non-
desirable response in police-public encounters. We estimate the causal effect of the use of body-
worn-videos on the two outcome variables using both between-group differences using a
Poisson regression model as well as before-after estimates using interrupted time-series
analyses.
Results: We found that the likelihood of force being used in control conditions were roughly
twice those in experimental conditions. Similarly, a pre/post analysis of use-of-force and
complaints data also support this result: the number of complaints filed against officers
dropped from 0.7 complaints per 1,000 contacts to 0.07 per 1,000 contacts. We discuss the
findings in terms of theory, research methods, policy and future avenues of research on body-
worn-videos.
Keywords: technology; deterrence theory; use-of-force; Police; Randomized Controlled Field
Trial; Body-Worn-Cameras

POLICE BODY-WORN CAMERAS
3
INTRODUCTION
In recent years the use of police body-worn-cameras by police has received extensive media
attention. These devices are commonly believed to achieve several aims, including: reducing
police use-of-force and complaints against officers, enhancing police legitimacy and
transparency, increasing prosecution rates and improving evidence capture by the police. The
publicity has been so great that many go on to assume that cameras can fundamentally change
‘flawed’ police practices. This was epitomized in a 2013 Manhattan Federal District Court ruling
that ordered officers in a precinct of New York Police Department with the highest volume of
stop-and-frisk to wear body-worn-cameras in order to prevent racial profiling. In a similar vein
across the Atlantic, the College of Policing in England and Wales identified body-worn-cameras
as the mechanism through which “dented public confidence” could be restored (BBC,
10/24/2013).
Despite great promises, there is no research evidence on the benefits of body-worn-
cameras. Other than anecdotal data captured in non-controlled conditions, without comparison
groups and without systematic gathering of evidence, no causal estimates of the outcomes of
these devices exist. In this paper we report on the first randomized controlled trial using body-
worn-cameras, which tested the effect of body-worn-cameras in Rialto across 12 months. The
study focused specifically on use-of-force and citizens’ complaints, which were hypothesized to
be affected by officers wearing cameras, given the possible deterrent effect of the devices on
noncompliant behavior.
The paper begins with a review of the literature on police use-of-force and citizens’
complaints against the police. These aspects of police behavior and police performance represent
two burning issues in American policing. Mistrust and a lack of confidence may already
characterize some communities’ perception of their local police force. The use of unnecessary or
excessive force by the police serves to further damage this relationship. Similarly, complaints
filed against police officersare central to policing, not only because scholars consider them a
proxy of police-public relations and police misconduct, but also because of their organizational
importance given the tremendous costs associated with these cases, particularly in an era of
austerity where many agencies are on the verge of bankruptcy (New York Times, 12/28/2013).
We then move on to describe the theoretical grounds for the hypothesized effect of
cameras. A rich body of evidence on perceived social-surveillance - self-awareness and socially-
desirable-responding – proposes that people adhere to social norms and change their conduct
because of the cognizance that someone else is watching. Elaborate research across several

POLICE BODY-WORN CAMERAS
4
categories of human behavior has shown that when certainty of apprehension for wrongdoing is
“high”, socially and morally unacceptable acts are less likely to occur. Both force and complaints
are assumed to be undesirable “negative” events - though admittedly both can be necessary
consequences of volatile police-public encounters – which should be kept to minimum. The
devices are thus hypothesized to decrease the tension in encounters and consequently reduce
these outcomes.
The methodology used to evaluate the body-worn-cameras is described next. We
conducted a randomized controlled trial, where nearly 1,000 officer shifts were randomized over
a 12-month period to treatment and control conditions. During “treatment shifts” officers were
required to wear and use the body-worn-cameras when interacting with members of the public,
while during “control shifts” officers were instructed not to carry or use the devices in any way.
We observed the number of complaints, incidents of use-of-force, and the number of contacts
between police officers and the public, in the years and months preceding the trial (in order to
establish a baseline) and during the 12 months of the experiment. We used three statistical
methods to analyze the outcomes: first, a Poisson regression model to estimate the causal effect
of the cameras between the treatment and control conditions. Second, we also conducted an
effect size analysis, in order to measure the magnitude of the difference between the groups in
terms of the rate of incidents per 1,000 contacts between the police and the members of the
public. Third, we employed interrupted time-series analysis to assess the city-wide impact of the
trial, before and after the implementation of body-worn-cameras. Finally, we discuss the
findings in terms of theory, police policy and research methods. We pay particular attention to
the possible causal mechanism behind the effect of the cameras on the use-of-force and citizen
complaints, and our concerns with violations of the stable unit treatment value assumption when
using the shift as the unit of analysis. Future avenues of research in this area are also suggested.
LITERATURE REVIEW
POLICE USE-OF-FORCE
Police use-of-force has received considerable attention in various disciplines. This scholastic
interest reflects significant investment by practitioners and decision-makers in better
understanding the ways in which law enforcement institutions exercise their power, and how
such powers can be managed. In democratic civilizations, the police are expected by the public
to use force when the situation justifies the use of “reasonable” power “necessary” to achieve
“legitimate purposes” (Alpert and Smith 1994; Bittner 1970). In fact, a defining characteristic of

POLICE BODY-WORN CAMERAS
5
the policing profession is that it requires potentially using “reasonable” and “necessary” force,
including deadly force, in a variety of chaotic situations that may be both (un)desired and
(un)expected by members of the public. (On the conditional support for police use-of-force by
race, gender and religion, see Halim and Stiles 2001).
Historically as well as contemporarily, police scholars have argued that there is a "social
contract” between the police and the citizens they “protect and serve”, an idea dating back
Hobbes (1651), Locke (1689), Rousseau (1762), and more recently Pettit (1987) and Shapiro
(2003). Collectively, this line of theorization purports that the police are responsible for
safeguarding and protecting the general social order, which includes protecting the safety of the
citizens and other police officers. In exchange for granting police officers the right, power, and
responsibility to use force, citizens expect police to only exercise force when it is necessary and
to only use the amount of force that is “reasonable”, “proportional” and “necessary” for that
situation. The police are, therefore, entrusted with the legal and moral responsibility to maintain
societal order and these imperatives are implemented through their legitimized use-of-force. So
important is “that responsibility, that police use-of-force is believed to involve the execution of
perhaps the essential function of the state and…because it affects the public's attitudes and
behaviors toward the police and government more generally” (Friedrich 1980:82).
Research in the area of use-of-force by the police has emphasized two distinct situations that
viewed as undesirable: the “use of excessive force” by the police (which is when an officer uses
more force than is necessary/justifiable/reasonable in a situation where some force was
justifiable) and/or the “unnecessary use-of-force” (which is when force is used by an officer but
no force was necessary/justifiable/reasonable in the context). These two types of situations are
argued to damage the relationship of the police with the community that they are expected “to
protect and serve” (Reiss 1968; Skolnick and Fyfe 1993; Worden 1996). When the police
undermine these expectations and violate their contract with the citizenry over the use-of-force,
police-public tensions rise (King and Waddington 2004; Weitzer 2000; 2002). When these
violations amount to outright “police violence”, the core foundation of police legitimacy is
undermined (Westley 1970).
EXPLAINING POLICE USE-OF-FORCE
In the present study we focus on three strands of research that purport to explain police use-
of-force: situational, psychological and organizational. In terms of situational factors, one
leading theory is based on the notion that police behavior is influenced by the social dynamics

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in "The effect of police body-worn cameras on use of force and citizens’ complaints against the police: a randomized controlled trial" ?

The authors discuss the findings in terms of theory, research methods, policy and future avenues of research on bodyworn-videos. 

Q2. What future works have the authors mentioned in the paper "The effect of police body-worn cameras on use of force and citizens’ complaints against the police: a randomized controlled trial" ?

Answering these questions may also provide a better understanding of future research avenues in this area might look like. 

Q3. What are the main cues that signal how the authors should behave?

Priming cues signaling how the authors ought to behave can range from reputational concerns (Bateson, Nettle and Roberts 2006; Burnham and Johnson 2005; Haley and Fessler 2005; Fehr and Schneider 2010) and feelings of shame, to fear of punishment for noncompliance (Boyd et al 2010). 

Q4. What makes police-public encounters more likely to be misconduct?

Police-public encounters become more transparent and the curtain of silence that protects misconduct can more easily be unveiled, which makes misconduct less likely. 

Q5. Why do the authors believe that CCTV cameras are weak modifiers of offenders' behavior?

The authors believe that the reason CCTV cameras were found to be weak modifiers of offenders' behavior is because the level of certainty of being apprehended necessary for the self-awareness mechanism to trigger, leading to socially-desirable behavior, is not high enough in CCTV. 

Q6. How many incidents of police use of force were recorded during the experimental period?

RESULTSDuring the experimental period a total of 25 incidents of police use-of-force were recordedby Rialto Police Department, of which 17 occurred during control shifts and 8 during experimental shifts. 

Q7. What statistical method was used to analyze the outcomes of the trial?

The authors used three statistical methods to analyze the outcomes: first, a Poisson regression model to estimate the causal effect of the cameras between the treatment and control conditions. 

Q8. How many complaints were filed against police-officers in the year prior to the experiment?

complaints lodged by citizens against police-officers are very infrequent, with 24 grievances filed against officers in the year prior to the experiment (about 0.7 for every 1,000 contacts). 

Q9. How many homicides did the Rialto Police Department deal with in 2009-2011?

In 2009-2011, the department dealt with six to seven homicides per year, which is nearly 50% higher than the US national rate per 100,000. 

Q10. What is the effect of cameras on the behavior of the suspect?

Cameras are thus likely to have a “self-awareness effect” that would both deter the police officer from reacting with excessive or unnecessary force, and cool down the “aggressive demeanor” of the suspect (or deter the police from interpreting demeanor in this way). 

Q11. Why is it important that police use-of-force affects the public's attitudes and?

So important is “that responsibility, that police use-of-force is believed to involve the execution of perhaps the essential function of the state and…because it affects the public's attitudes and behaviors toward the police and government more generally” (Friedrich 1980:82). 

Q12. What research would suggest that even with variations in ‘actors’, there may be stable?

Other research (e.g. Wikström et al 2012) would suggest that even with variations in ‘actors’, there may be stable environmental cues that are conducive to specific actions, but the use of force by police still depends on the interaction between individuals and their settings (the situation). 

Q13. What is the implications for police legitimacy?

The implications for police legitimacy are substantial, which makes reducing the rate of complaints a major goal of a police complaints and discipline system (Liederbach et al 2008).