
A Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations - ddlatham
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/upshot/a-big-test-of-police-body-cameras-defies-expectations.html
======
will_brown
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?

~~~
frogpelt
How was the case handled? Did they find the gunman? Was he charged?

I ask because, honestly, I don't think I care what they police say when they
first walk up as long as they solve the crime, catch the perpetrator.

The problem we have nowadays is that we get to see "how the (justice system)
sausage is made" a lot more than we used to. And it's disturbing. But those
guys out there with uniforms on are the ones trying to survive every day and
bring criminals to justice. It's easy to be an armchair quarterback.

~~~
will_brown
Here is what happened...

The next morning I get a call from the detective in the county to the South
confirming he obtained video from the gas station where this all originated
(the defendant approaching me while I’m pumping gas).

Next I get a notification from Apple my iPad has been found, which I placed in
lost/stolen mode. I call the detective who doesn’t answer his phone and then
the police station in the county where I escaped and my iPad was located.
Dispatch informed me they would not go to the address provided by Apple to
look for the defendant, my car or iPad until I drove back up to that county
and met with the police.

I drove back to the county and met with two police officers who drove to the
address (only 1.5 miles from the police station) but they did not see my
vehicle, and apparently there was no way they would get a warrant to search
the domicile for my iPad and they wouldn’t bother knocking to see if the
suspect was there.

Unconvinced I worked up the nerve to drive by the property myself...I’ll be
damned if I didn’t see my car driving up and down the streets of this
neighborhood. I did my best to tail the car until it parked 1 house away from
the address provided by Apple, and watched as the defendant got out of my car
walked into the the street as I drove past. Once again I called 911 and plead
they come back out to the address while I waited a few blocks away.

Once I saw a police car enter the neighborhood I followed until we arrived at
my car which had already been relocated about a block away from where I saw it
park and I drove past the defendant. On scene an officer was questioning 2
individuals on the front porch of the house where my car was parked and the
defendant was standing on the sidewalk about 5 feet from my car. I basically
yelled officer that’s the man who kidnapped me with a gun and car jacked me.
He was handcuffed and taken into custody.

Shortly after I was asked to appear at the police station where I ended up
being questioned and accused of trying to buy “the hard stuff”...I had to ask,
apparently that’s crack. And this was the same detective who already obtained
video of the gas station corroborating my entire story, I explained I was an
attorney that I had just run 18 miles on the morning I was kidnapped (showed
my run keeper app and everything) and otherwise I wasn’t celebrating my 18
mile run with crack. Almost immediately I was told I can go, of course I asked
if he would get a warrant to recover my iPad and more important look for the
gun, and I was told “no, those kinds of resources don’t exist.”

The defendant was arrested on Sunday, charged with grand theft of an auto and
bonded out on Monday. Not until the “State Attorney Hearing” a few weeks later
where the State attoney confirmed she had 2 prior cases against this guy where
with similar facts: he stole a car in the county to the South and the cars
were recovered in the county to the North, did I finally feel vindicated.
Then, 1 week later his bond was revoked and the real charges came including
assault with a deadly weapon and kidnapping with a fire arm.

As to it being easy to be a armchair quarterback, I wouldn’t know but I’ll
take your word for it.

Edit: deleted link to the public record of the case

~~~
rconti
Damn, that's terrible. I don't even get the police's implication here-- If
you're trying to buy illegal drugs, you DESERVE to be carjacked, and
furthermore they shouldn't try to press charges on the carjacker until it's
proven that they weren't trying to sell you illegal drugs? The mind boggles.

~~~
syshum
>> I don't even get the police's implication here-- If you're trying to buy
illegal drugs, you DESERVE to be carjacked,

I dont know about "deserved" but if they can make it a drug case then they can
keep the car, the ipad, and probably steal err "seize" more property from the
victim under civil asset forfeiture

Further they can use that statistic to point to an increase in "drug activity"
in the county opening up the dept for grants from the DEA and other federal
programs under the failed War on Drugs

A simple car jacking they get no money for. Violent crime they get no money
for

Drugs is where the money is

~~~
rconti
_sigh_ I wish you weren't right, but that's a good point.

------
BugsJustFindMe
> _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
> _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
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
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.

~~~
jamesw6811
There is a pretty big difference in your two examples. Models of bosons behave
in a predictable way. I can think of several likely reasons that reports of
use-of-force incidents would not correlate directly with actual use-of-force.

As a result, in a study or a journalistic write-up of said study, I wouldn't
jump to the shorthand of "tracked use-of-force incidents" as opposed to
"reports of use-of-force incidents".

Just because something is the best way of measuring a quantity we currently
have doesn't mean it is good enough to equate the measurement with the
quantity in shorthand.

~~~
dpark
I think the examples track pretty well. You could say that body cameras
somehow cause a rise and reporting that exactly offsets the reduction in
violence, but that’s not even wild conjecture. It’s worse. It’s inventing
factors to make the data fit, factors that are by definition not measurable.
Whatever we measure, it’s possible to invent a factor that makes the
measurement completely wrong.

Scientists could similarly argue that there is another particle that only
shows up when we measure that happens to look exactly like the Higgs boson in
every way we can measure. But then everyone would call bullshit.

Again, if there are better/other things to measure, that’s legitimate
criticism. Simply inventing factors that make the valid measurements null and
declaring it impossible to actually measure isn’t.

~~~
BugsJustFindMe
Measure what you can measure. Claim what you can claim. Don't claim what you
can't claim based on what you measured. We're not talking about counting
photons here. We're talking about human selective self-reporting under
different circumstances. Understand the chasm between those things.

------
jandrese
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.

~~~
losvedir
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
>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.

~~~
dsr_
Only millions? No problem at all.

Let's revise that estimate, though.

765,000 sworn state-level personnel in 2008. We'll round up to a million.

At $1000 each for hardened, certified cameras, that's a billion dollars. But
we should expect them to last about three years, so $333M each year.

Storage costs are cheap, but secure handling of storage is not. Let's say one
full-time $100K employee per hundred camera-wearing officers. That's a billion
dollars per year.

So I'll go with a cost estimate of 1.3 - 1.5 billion per year for cameras for
all police officers.

Is that worth it? I think so.

~~~
jandrese
Why is the lifetime so short? Are the batteries non-replaceable? I'd
definitely be looking into replacing worn out batteries on $1000 devices.

~~~
dsr_
Oh, it will probably go down over time, but remember that police departments
aren't going to go out and buy $399 Go-Pros.

No, they'll be buying tactical harnesses and military-tough specially cased
relabeled $299 Go-Pros for $999 for each complete system, from a certified
minority-owned business in partnership with Halliburton.

~~~
Banthum
The way you chained that together was almost musical.

------
vladislav
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
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.

~~~
literallycancer
>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.

Why would there be any expectation of privacy for public officials?

~~~
rocqua
Public officials go to the toilet. Public officials get calls about private
matters during the day.

Those are just the basics where a public officials is essentially a private
person. These alone should be enough.

There is a whole 'nother set of cases where it is good for a public official
to not have to take into consideration they are being monitored. Most of this
comes down to helping communication. There is also value in letting people
make small mistakes, or even letting people slack of on occasion.

In short, there is a very large overlap between the arguments against a
surveillance state and the arguments against always on body cams. Consider
also the phenomenon of 'glassholes'. That is, people really disliked talking
to someone wearing google glass because they were being filmed.

------
NuSkooler
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
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.

------
linsomniac
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
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.

------
mcguire
" _“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.

------
djyaz1200
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.

------
whack
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
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.

~~~
YokoZar
Also, if you can turn off your body cam (or fail to turn it on), then you are
free to behave however you want as though you weren't on camera.

------
datenwolf
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).

------
givinguflac
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
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
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.

~~~
sigstoat
> I find this idea very toxic. If the state can send an agent somewhere...

if the cops bust into your house because they misread the address of the
warrant (something which happens regularly), and they capture some video of
you walking around eating cereal naked, do you think that should immediately
and irrevocably go up on youtube?

~~~
jMyles
Obviously in a decent society this is a horrific, abhorrent affront.

And yes, I'm fine with the horrific, abhorrent affronts of the state being
public if I'm the victim.

How about we stop allowing police to search homes in the first place in 99.9%
of cases?

~~~
s73ver_
"And yes, I'm fine with the horrific, abhorrent affronts of the state being
public if I'm the victim."

Ok. I'm not.

~~~
yojex
If an agent of the state commits a "horrific, abhorrent affront" against you,
you want it to be kept secret? That's what I'm reading here.

~~~
s73ver_
That would be a fair interpretation if that's all they did. However, we all
know that law enforcement agents do lots of other things that the people
involved would rather not be made public. A cop being a first responder to
someone having a seizure, or consoling a rape victim, are things that I'm
pretty sure those people would not want to be public.

~~~
mulmen
Ok but in that case the state did not commit an abhorrent act.

------
busted
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
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.

------
mtalantikite
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-
material...](http://bwc.thelab.dc.gov/static/files/supplementary-
materials.pdf)

~~~
mcguire
Were the officers who were not filming also not wearing cameras?

------
ddlatham
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._

~~~
oh_sigh
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
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-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-16/taser-is-charging-
stunning-fees-to-handle-police-video)

Taser probably just puts the videos in AWS or something, but the markup is
obscene.

------
wisty
> 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.

------
gwern
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."

------
gremlinsinc
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?

------
brudgers
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.

------
csomar
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?

------
floatingatoll
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
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. "_

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

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Overtonwindow
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.

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

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

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theptip
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
Also less false allegations against them

