Surveilling the Police: Do Body-Worn Cameras Prevent Police Bias from Becoming Systemic?

• In Event: Prosecutors and Policy Effects: Findings from Four Jurisdictions

Abstract

Would surveilling the police reduce racial disparities in the criminal justice system?
Using the staggered roll-out of police body-worn cameras (BWCs) in North Carolina, we find that BWCs reduce arrest rates for Black people — but not for white
people. These effects on arrests are concentrated in low-level crimes that almost never lead to incarceration, and therefore, could not, on their own, generate large changes in incarceration. Nonetheless, we find that BWCs reduce incarceration rates for Black people by 11%. To unpack these downstream effects, we fielded an original survey of North Carolina prosecutors. We find that prosecutors who report questioning police reports more frequently reduce incarceration disparities relative to others in the same office and unit. Yet prosecutors’ skepticism of police reports stops mattering once BWCs have been adopted, suggesting that surveillance is a substitute for skepticism.
Finally, we find evidence that prosecutors with more exposure to BWCs believe that police are less reliable and arrests are more racially biased, suggesting that BWCs reveal a different reality than the one originally presented by the police.

Authors

• Emma Harrington, University of Virginia

• Hannah Shaffer, Harvard University