The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), law enforcement’s default think tank, recently published its 10-year look-back report on the phenomenon of body-worn cameras (BWCs) in American policing. The report detailed the changes BWCs have brought about and those likely to come.
The last technology to have this much impact on law enforcement was the two-way radio. Today’s cops wouldn’t consider hitting the street without communications, but there was a time when a cop who needed to call for assistance or find out where he was to take a report had to find a curbside call box or borrow a telephone line from a friendly citizen or merchant. Now, every patrol car has a radio, and there’s a second one on the officer’s hip.
In the “aught” decade (2001-2010) of the new millennium, forensic science, or more accurately the public’s notion of it, created new expectations. The TV show “CSI” and its spin-offs and clones had every Hollywood detective relying on a whiz kid who could pick up a rock from the crime scene and tell you the name of the perpetrator, where he could be found at that moment, and what he had for breakfast on the day of the crime. The public believed every word of it, and the dreaded “CSI Effect” was born. If there wasn’t a boatload of forensic evidence presented at trial, juries assumed the state had a weak case.
What CSI was to the naughts, BWCs are to the teens (2011-2020). Before the dust has settled at any critical incident involving police, Joe Sixpack is clamoring for video. In fact, he doesn’t just want video, he wants it from multiple angles, from both car and body-mounted cameras, and from any security or surveillance cameras that happened to catch any of the action. The detective who didn’t have forensic evidence had a weak case. The street cop who doesn’t have video is trying to cover something up. Welcome to the court of public opinion.
PERF’s information came from a survey of almost 700 chief law enforcement executives (chiefs, sheriffs, commissioners, etc.), analysis of BWC policies from 137 agencies, 40 one-on-one interviews with BWC program administrators, and an all-day, in-person meeting of 200 BWC advocates in Washington, DC. The final report is 64 pages long. The full report appears at the end of this article.
Without question, BWC deployment has become the standard, rather than the exception for law enforcement agencies. Some states have taken the BWC decision out of executives’ hands and mandated it statewide. In 2016, about 48% of local police departments and 46% of sheriff’s offices deployed BWCs with their officers and deputies. By 2023, 82% of 142 agencies responding to a PERF survey said they had at least one BWC in the field.100% of police agencies serving one million or more people are using BWCs.
A significant factor in the expanded deployment of BWCs is improvement of the hardware itself. The first BWCs were a two-piece unit, with a lipstick-size camera attached to a headset, pair of glasses, hat brim, or shirt epaulet, and a cable leading to the recorder and battery, carried in a pocket or on the duty belt. Virtually all BWC vendors have now condensed the hardware to a single unit slightly smaller than a pack of cigarettes, usually mounted on the shirt front. Several TV cops routinely check out cameras and show their output displayed on screen, which has helped with the public’s acceptance of the new technology. It also doesn’t hurt the major vendors when they get product placement, including their logo superimposed on the upper right corner of the video frame, incorporated into the TV program.
Policy reviews
The first element of BWC programs PERF considered was department policy. This entailed a review of existing policies and set out considerations for agencies who have yet to implement BWCs in their operations. They found that most policies addressed the following areas:
- Activation
- Deactivation
- Citizen notification
- Officer authority to review
- Supervisor authority to review
- Off-duty assignment
- Activation during demonstrations
- Temporary activation (and muting)
- Frequency of supervisory auditing
- Mentions of non-patrol units wearing BWCs
These topics were identified in a separate study performed by the Bureau of Justice Assistance in 2019. In the years intervening since that study, the only “significant policy change” was a decline in the number of law enforcement agencies that permitted officers to view the video recorded in critical incidents before writing their reports.
The surveys, interviews and conferences resulted in the identification of five issues agencies should consider in contemplating a BWC program:
- Privacy considerations: Will you record only arrests and traffic stops, or also while officers are interviewing victims and witnesses? Will you record inside private homes? Under what circumstances will videos be made available to the public?
- Impact on police-community relationships: Will recording injure the relationships you have with community members? Will people be as open with the police as they were before the cameras were there?
- Impact on internal procedural justice and trust within the agency: How will supervisors and police executives use the video from BWCs?
- Managing expectations: Some people will assume that every encounter with a police officer will be recorded, that the cameras will run continuously while the wearer is on duty.
- Financial considerations: The cost of the cameras is only the beginning. Responding to the public’s demand for recorded video and paying for archival storage will quickly overshadow the purchase costs.
The report goes into considerable detail concerning these and other bullet points. The general recommendation is that officers should be required to activate their cameras when responding to calls for service and during other police-citizen encounters. When in doubt, press the “record” button. When interviewing victims and witnesses, tell the citizen they are being recorded and shut off the camera if they have an objection. As a compromise, offer to cover the lens of the camera or point it elsewhere, and record only the audio portion.
State law regarding the preservation of evidence and records may dictate how long video will be kept before it is deleted. In the absence of any such law, estimate how much time passes before it is unlikely a citizen will make a complaint about an officer’s conduct or there is some other incident where the video might be relevant.
Although some agencies require supervisors to conduct random reviews of videos recorded by their subordinates, PERF recommends that random reviews be performed by “an internal audit unit” to check on compliance with policy and other aspects of performance. Supervisors should restrict their reviews to incidents that might offer valuable examples for training, to investigate complaints, and to assess the performance of probationary employees or officers with a history of citizen complaints. There also needs to be language in the agency’s policy governing the unauthorized release of video recordings.
Effects on officer behavior
Although it’s difficult to make a broad assumption about how wearing a BWC affects the behavior of the officer wearing it, the trend is positive regarding more desirable officer conduct. Several studies comparing the incidence of use of force (UOF) by officers with and without BWCs showed reduced UOF in about half the studies, and no difference in UOF with the others. Officers who routinely failed to activate their BWCs were more likely to engage in UOF episodes. Other studies reflect a significant reduction in misconduct complaints against officers who wear BWCs. Commentary on these studies posits that some officers behave better because they know their actions are being recorded. If that is the case and the cops are dialing it back because of the cameras, go with it. Take the win, regardless of the reason.
The availability of BWC-produced footage leads to faster conclusion of officer misconduct complaints, with some complaints withdrawn as soon as the complainant learns there is BWC video of the incident. Frivolous complaints and attempts to get a big settlement payday from a civil lawsuit decline rapidly when video is available. A review of misconduct complaints at the Chicago PD showed that complaints against officers generally and complaints of racial disparity in particular “fade away with the implementation of BWCs.”
Strategic use
Executives who engage in “Monday-morning quarterbacking” (MMQ) of officers’ actions in the field tend to lose the respect of their officers. PERF used a revised method of MMQ to address policy development, rather than criticism of individual cops. PERF Executive Director Chuck Wexler organized several meetings of police leaders to review video taken in high-profile incidents such as the 2020 shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin and the 2023 in-custody death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee. Rather than focus on the actions of individual officers, Wexler asked more general questions, such as if the actions of the officers were consistent with their training, and whether supervisors should have been present. He also explored the internal culture of some specialized units, an issue that was of particular concern in the Memphis case and the members of the SCORPION (Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace In Our Neighborhoods) detail.
At the Montgomery County (Maryland) PD, two sergeants conduct random internal audits of BWC video to determine if officer conduct is consistent with agency policy and state and county law. The Louisville (Kentucky) Metro Police Department has a similar program. To avoid officers’ concerns that the review process is not a method to target individual officers, agency commanders attend patrol roll calls to explain the audits as ensuring compliance with policy and training.
Many agencies lack the resources to dedicate personnel to the review of BWC video. PERF found that 57% of agencies responding to surveys required line supervisors to audit BWC recordings. The most common formula was to have supervisors review random video created by their officers on a monthly or quarterly basis. While most supervisors acknowledge the value of these reviews, they still regard it as burdensome and detracting from the time available for on-site supervision. A lieutenant from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department shared this view, but noted that the audits allowed supervisors to provide feedback on consistent performance.
Minnesota takes a different approach statewide, requiring law enforcement agencies to set up an independent, external audit of BWC video every two years. The video is compared with crime and incident reports filed in conjunction with the video to ensure that incidents are appropriately classified. If noncompliance is found, the agency’s BWC program is suspended until compliance is regained.
Prosecutors preparing cases for trial often review BWC video from the case, sometimes far in excess of what police supervisors see. Several prosecutors recommended to PERF that the prosecutor’s office be an active participant in policy development and implementation to ensure officers are exercising their police powers in compliance with the law.
To review or not to review?
A hot button topic in any discussion of BWC policy is whether officers should be permitted to review the video recorded by their BWC prior to writing their report. In its 2014 report on BWCs, PERF advocated allowing officers to see their video first, before they wrote their reports. PERF’s position on that topic is now far more equivocal.
The “pro” arguments on this topic are straightforward. The police report should be an accurate account of what transpired. Officers who review their videos are better equipped to write precise narratives of what transpired, not having to rely solely on their memory, which can be distorted by any number of factors. In the 2019 report on BWCs from the Bureau of Justice Assistance, 92% of agencies that had received federal funding for their BWC programs allowed officers to review their videos before authoring their reports. By 2023, a survey with a different sample showed that only 56% of agencies allowed pre-report review of video.
Some agencies take a middle-ground position. At the Portland (Oregon) Police Bureau, officers cited in an internal affairs investigation first submit to a “perceptual interview” intended to capture the officer’s state of mind and perception of the events. The officer can then review the video and clarify any discrepancies between their recall and the video. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency is contemplating a similar approach. PERF’s official position now favors perceptual interviews.
The effect of video review on an officer’s mental health is relevant. In the case of a shooting or some other potentially traumatic event, reviewing the video can cause the officer to relive the moment and prolong the reconciliation process. Several police and mental health professionals recommend having a psychologist or therapist review the video with the officer to minimize the traumatic effect it might have.
Getting cops to push the button
“One of the biggest issues with body cameras is officers who don’t turn them on,” said Chief Wayne Jones of the Miami Beach (FL) Police Department. This sentiment was echoed among other police executives. The greatest resistance to consistent camera activation often comes from senior officers who spent their careers with far less technology.
Progressive discipline may push reluctant officers to comply with policy, but many agencies are taking the decision away from the individual officer by implementing automatic activation of the camera. Depending on the hardware in place, cameras can be set to activate when the patrol car’s roof lights are activated, when the car door opens, when another BWC in the immediate vicinity is turned on, by a remote command from the dispatch center, or when the officer draws his sidearm. Officers can still shut the camera off, but the automated methods circumvent the problem when an officer just forgets to push the button.
Releasing video and the use of AI
PERF advocates a clear policy on the release of BWC video. This rule is often omitted from agency policies. In preparing for the 2023 conference on this topic, PERF reviewed the BWC policies of 127 agencies and found that only 14% included an explanation of when and how video would be made available to the public. An increasingly common practice is to produce a video to post on YouTube and send to media outlets that sets out all the circumstances of the incident and allows the agency to put the video into context. It’s not total control of the narrative, but it’s a good start.
Some agencies are turning to artificial intelligence to help them mine and manage large sets of video recordings. A properly trained AI application can review many hours of video and flag those segments that contain specific words or phrases or include an identifiable image or object. There will be errors and misidentifications with an immature system, but human intervention will identify the good and bad matches and train the system to produce more accurate results with each iteration.
AI is already used to transcribe interviews and incidents in the field, reducing the dialogue to printed word. Where speech recognition applications from a few years ago were maybe 98% accurate (which sounds great until you appreciate that amounts to more than one error for every two lines of text), newer programs reduce the errors to a fraction of one percent.
AI comes with a big “CAUTION” flag. Misdirected AI can lead to unintended discrimination of racial and ethnic groups and targeting of culturally sensitive populations. It’s easy to get carried away with new technology, and not see where it’s going. Inclusion of sensitive groups in policy development can avoid this problem.
The PERF report did a great job of describing the present BWC landscape from a technological, administrative, political and cultural perspective. This summary only hits the high points. If you are involved in a BWC program or think you will be soon, you should download your own copy and study it.
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