Reducing use of force & complaints against the police using body-worn cameras: A randomized controlled trial

• In Event: Police Complaints: Issues and Challenges

Abstract

Whether justified or excessive, the exercise of power by the police can potentially tarnish their relationship with the community. Police misconduct can lead to complaints against the police, which are themselves costly. The question we try to answer is: do body worn cameras reduce the prevalence of use-of-force & citizens’ complaints against the police? We 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 (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 for between-group differences using a Poisson regression model as well as before-after estimates using interrupted time-series analyses. We found that the incident rate of force being used in control conditions was roughly twice that in experimental conditions. A pre/post analysis of use of force and complaints data also supports this result. We discuss the findings in terms of theory, research methods and policy.

Authors

• Barak Ariel, Cambridge University / Hebrew University

• William Farrar, Rialto Police Department

• Alex Sutherland, University of Cambridge