Should We See Everything a Cop Sees? - The New York Times - 2 views
www.nytimes.com/...police-body-cameras.html
human sciences SocialScience perception sensory perception crime police privacy big data data psychology justice law racism
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 25 Oct 16
- No Cached
-
Much of the moral case for bodycams, that they reduce police violence, rests on a single experiment: the 2012 Rialto study
-
The data from nearly 1,000 shifts and 50,000 hours of police-public interactions showed that when officers wore bodycams, they were less likely to use batons, Tasers, firearms and pepper spray or to have confrontations that resulted in police-dog bites, and they were far less likely to receive civilian complaints about their conduct.
-
In an essay published shortly after the White House announced its $75 million in bodycam funding in 2014, two authors of the study, Barak Ariel and Alex Sutherland, hypothesized that it was not cameras alone that drove the positive results; it was the fact that before every interaction with a citizen, officers in the trial were required to announce that they were recording. There may have been a “self-awareness effect”: Both parties were reminded at the moment of contact that they were under surveillance and that they should behave accordingly. One question was whether the effect would hold up if officers did not announce the cameras’ presence. Another was whether it would hold up when the cameras lost their novelty.
- ...1 more annotation...
-
Their resulting analysis of 2.2 million officer hours, published this May, seems to validate their concerns that Rialto offered an incomplete picture. It found that police use of force actually went up by an astonishing 71 percent when officers could turn their cameras on and off at will and went down (by 37 percent) only when they recorded nearly every interaction with the public from start to finish.