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BWCs vs. Gun Mounted Cameras

The use of cameras by police departments — whether body-mounted or on automobile dashboards — has become much more common in just the past few years. Now, some cities and towns — including Williams, Arizona — are testing gun-mounted cameras as an innovation.Will they be more effective? What are the concerns and possible pitfalls? Listen as Michael White, professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at ASU, talks about these questions.

In View: What Have We Learned from The BWC Implementation Program So Far?

In FY 2015, the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) funded the Body-Worn Camera (BWC) Training and Technical Assistance (TTA) program to help police agencies and communities implement their BWC Policy Implementation Program (PIP) initiatives and learn lessons from those initiatives for the benefit of other agencies and communities. Since then, the BWC TTA team has responded to over 200 TTA requests, conducted 15 webinars, held 3 regional meetings and 2 national meetings, developed new technical assistance resources, and provided direct technical assistance to over 176 law enforcement agencies across the country.

Through this work, the BWC TTA team has gained a deeper understanding of the complexities and challenges agencies face when implementing a BWC program. Below, we review some of the lessons learned from our BWC PIP agencies over the past two years. These lessons learned should serve as important considerations for agencies just beginning or in the midst of BWC implementation.

1. Have a plan.

As with any new equipment deployment or substantial policy change, agencies must operationally plan how to roll out a BWC program. Planning should be thoughtful, comprehensive, and collaborative, and the plan should include several key factors: identifying program goals, establishing a timeline for deployment, conducting pilot tests, establishing working groups with internal and external representatives, conducting fiscal reviews and preliminary meetings with external stakeholders, reviewing related state legislation, determining staff and technology infrastructure needs, and more (see the BJA BWC Toolkit for guidance on getting started with a BWC program). This planning is fundamental to the implementation process.

2. Be flexible.

Although planning is vital to the successful deployment of BWCs, BWC PIP agencies also stress the importance of remaining flexible throughout the entire implementation process. Plans will change, new state legislation may require policy changes, fiscal changes will occur, equipment may not be as interoperable as promised, and challenges in establishing the infrastructure to support the program will arise. Agencies must be ready to adapt to these uncertainties.

3. Engage internal stakeholders.

Many of the BJA BWC PIP agencies have noted the importance of engaging officers early in the process. Officers should be part of the policy development process, the pilot testing phase, and training development. Actively engaging officers early in the process ensures greater buy-in for the BWC programand greater overall likelihood of success. 

4. Engage external stakeholders.

 BWC programs must also engage external stakeholdersfrom the community, as well as local government and criminal justice partners such as the prosecutor, city manager, and representatives from the local court system. These stakeholders are essential to the success of the program. Agencies should engage them in the process from the very start.

Agencies seeking to implement BWCs should hold multiple meetings with the community to leverage partners such as the NAACP, ACLU, and victims’ advocates. BWC PIP agencies note the importance of seeking input from the community in the policy development phase and being transparent about each phase of the deployment process. Some agencies have tried various methods (e.g., postcards, online surveys, town hall meetings) to inform, engage, and gather input from their communities.

Greensboro Police Department Body-Worn Camera FAQs Card

Criminal justice stakeholders are also vital to a BWC program. Prosecutors are, in many ways, an end user of BWC video. Agencies must work closely with prosecutors to create procedures for efficiently and responsibly transfering and sharing BWC video. Prosecutors and police agencies are beginning to understand the effect BWC footage can have on investigations and prosecutions. Working closely with these partners while implementing BWCs results in better processes and fewer challenges with program management.

Featured webinar: Beyond Arrest: Prosecutor and defense attorney perspectives. Click here to view the webinar

5. Train.

According to the BWC PIP sites, training is integral to ensuring that officers understand the policy and technology. Training should include related state legislation, how to activate, when or when not to activate, how to catalogue and tag videos, reporting requirements, the limitations of the camera technology, and departmental compliance and auditing.

Furthermore, agencies should consider using BWC footage for training. Agencies like the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, the San Antonio, Texas Police Department, and the Sturgis, Michigan, Police Department frequently use BWC footage to showcase best practices and areas for improved tactics and decision-making skills.The BWC TTA team developed a Training Guide as a resource for law enforcement agencies seeking to develop or modify their BWC training programs. The  guide provides police instructors with a standardized BWC training template that includes an introduction to issues surrounding the development of BWCs, BWC specifications and operations (which vary by vendor), key issues in policy and practice, and topics related to agency accountability.

Agencies should also consider including community representatives in these training sessions or conducting separate training sessions for the media and public. Not only will these sessions encourage transparency and community buy-in, they will also serve as a means for the public to get an up-close look at how police use BWCs in the field.

Featured webinar: A Spotlight on BWCs and Training. Click here to view the webinar

6. Engage with a research partner.

Though working with a research partner is not a PIP requirement, many funded agencies have engaged with research entities to conduct process evaluations, impact evaluations, or both. Research partners can be a valuable resource during program planning, implementation, and ongoing program management. They can also independently and rigorously assess the BWC program.

7. Audit.

Finally, BWC PIP agencies stress the importance of auditing BWC footage. Once BWCs are deployed, agencies should periodically review and audit videos to ensuring officers use BWCs according to departmental policy. BWC footage can also be used to evaluate performance, highlight training opportunities, and identify areas for department-wide policy and procedure changes.

Featured webinar: Considering The Issues Around Assessing Officer Compliance. Click here to view the webinar 

BWCs in Small Agencies

With the implementation of BWCs across the country increasing rapidly, there has been little attention devoted to the deployment of BWCs by small agencies, and as a result, our understanding of the challenges of cameras in the small agency context is limited. In order to better understand how BWCs affect small agencies, researchers at Arizona State University conducted a multi-state survey of small law enforcement agency executives. The survey, which was administered via the online survey platform Qualtrics, was sent to all jurisdictions with a population of 8,000 or more in 26 states.

The Benefits of BWCs

Many community stakeholders and criminal justice leaders have suggested placing body-worn cameras (BWCs) on police officers improves the civility of police-citizen encounters and enhances citizen perceptions of police transparency and legitimacy.  In response, many police departments have adopted this technology to improve the quality of policing in their communities. However, the existing evaluation evidence on the intended and unintended consequences of outfitting police officers with BWCs is still developing.

In View: BWCs and the Results of Randomized Experiments

Recent years have seen a number of new research studies addressing the effects of body-worn cameras (BWCs). Several of these studies implemented randomized controlled designs, the strongest designs available to detect the effect of BWCs with high confidence. Under randomized designs, researchers randomly assign an intervention (in this case, BWCs) to a treatment group of officers (those with BWCs) and a control group of officers (those without BWCs). If they implement the randomization correctly, then there is no real difference between the treatment and control groups, except that one received the intervention (BWCs) and the other did not. As a result, we can confidently attribute any observed differences in the outcomes of interest between these two groups to BWCs.
 
Somewhat vexing is the fact that these rigorous studies have produced different findings. For example, a study in Rialto, California, found dramatic reductions in use of force incidents and complaints against officers after the introduction of BWCs. [1] Other studies in Mesa, Arizona [2]; Orlando, Florida [3]; Phoenix, Arizona [4]; and Spokane, Washington [5] produced similar findings regarding the direction of the influence of BWCs—use of force incidents and complaints were reduced—but the reductions were not so dramatic. These studies also found positive outcomes regarding citizen approval of BWCs and positive effects of BWCs on citizen views of police legitimacy. More recently, other studies produced different findings. A study in the United Kingdom found increases in assaults on officers wearing BWCs [6], and a recent study of BWCs in the Metropolitan Washington, DC, Police Department [7] found no differences between treatment and control groups regarding use of force incidents and complaints against police.
What are policy-makers and practitioners to make of these different findings, and why do rigorous scientific research designs produce such different findings? Here we provide some suggestions for how to interpret the recent findings on the effects of BWCs. We focus on three important issues: jurisdictional differences in context, contamination in randomized studies, and compliance with BWC policies.
 
Jurisdictional differences. Rigorous studies of BWCs do not always arrive at the same conclusions about the effects of BWCs because real differences exist among jurisdictions. Simply put, the implementation of BWCs is likely to be different in Rialto, California, and Washington, DC—the communities are different, the histories of police-civilian relationships are different, and the actual implementation of BWCs in each agency might have been different. For example, the implementation of BWCs in Washington, DC occurred after several years of scrutiny and improvements in police operations under a consent decree. This was not the case in Rialto. Thus, it is reasonable to expect more dramatic changes in police-civilian relations after the implementation of BWCs in Rialto than in Washington, where good relations may have already existed. If the baseline frequency of use of force incidents and complaints against police are low at the outset of an experiment with BWCs, large reductions after BWC implementation are less likely.
 
Contamination. One concern with randomized experiments is the contamination issue, which occurs when members of a control group become exposed to the treatment group intervention such that their behavior becomes more like the members of the treatment group. In the case of BWC experiments, if control group (non-camera-wearing) officers are frequently exposed to treatment group (camera-wearing) officers, the control officers will likely react to the presence of the BWCs and act more like they are wearing BWCs themselves. This occurs, for example, when a camera-wearing and a non-camera-wearing officer arrive at the location of the same call for service. In this instance, the non-camera-wearing officer, if he or she notices the camera-wearing officer (or if the camera-wearing officer lets the other officer know a camera is present), may change his or her behavior during the incident. If such contamination happens often, the conditions of the experiment—separation of the treatment and control group—are lost or diminished, and differences between treatment and control groups will be less likely. In the case of a recent randomized BWC study in Las Vegas, Nevada [8], researchers determined that contamination between treatment and control officers occurred less than 20 percent of the time, and they found significant differences between the groups. In the Washington, DC study, in which differences between treatment and control officers were not found, researchers reported up to 70 percent contamination.[7] Thus, contamination is an important factor to consider when reviewing research results.
 
Policy compliance. Another important factor to consider when reviewing BWC research results is policy compliance. BWC policies typically provide guidance to officers on when to activate and when to deactivate BWCs, and whether officers are required to (or advised to) inform civilians that the incident is being recorded. If officers are required to turn their cameras on at certain times and notify civilians of the BWC, and they do not do so on regular basis, then there is a noncompliance issue—officers are not routinely following policy. If officers are noncompliant with BWC policy a majority of the time, the conditions of the experiment are again weakened. Either the camera is not operating, or the civilians do not know the camera is present, or both, in which case the hypothesized “civilizing” effect of the camera is negated. Thus, it is possible to implement an experiment with good randomization between treatment and control groups, and low contamination, but lose the desired effects of the cameras as a result of compliance problems. In our work with BWC technical assistance and through our involvement with BWC research, we have seen wide differences in BWC compliance in different jurisdictions— ranging from less than 40 percent compliance in one, to over 90 percent compliance in another. Recently, the Metropolitan Washington, DC, Police Department reported a compliance rate of approximately 65 percent for BWC activation.[9] This too may have contributed to the finding of no differences between treatment and control groups in that study.
Summary
 
We have illustrated several important features of BWC programs and BWC research projects that readers and research consumers should keep in mind when interpreting BWC research results: jurisdictional differences, contamination issues, and compliance issues. To be sure, these are not simple, clear-cut issues. It is possible to have low contamination or low compliance and still find no differences between treatment and control officers, and it is possible to have high contamination and still find differences between treatment and control officers. Even if these factors are well managed and controlled for in BWC research, it is possible that jurisdictional differences (e.g., different use of force and complaint baselines) will drive the research results.
 
Complexities such as these make clear the need for replication in the sciences. Studies must be done repeatedly under different conditions in different jurisdictions to amass a large body of scientific evidence on which to base decisions and judgements. BWC research has not yet reached this point, though the limited body of evidence in existence points to the conclusion that BWCs are beneficial to the police and their communities. Still, research and analysis must continue, with strong scrutiny of the results, to sort out these confounding issues.
 
REFERENCES
[1] Ariel, Barak, Tony Farrar, and Alex Sutherland, “The Effect of Police Body-Worn Cameras on Use of Force and Citizens’ Complaints Against the Police: A Randomized Controlled Trial,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 31(2015): 1–27.
 
[2] Mesa Police Department, On-Officer Body Camera System: Program Evaluation and Recommendations (Mesa, AZ: Mesa Police Department, 2013)
 
 [3] Jennings, Wesley G., Mathew D. Lynch, and Lorie Fridell, “Evaluating the impact of police officer body-worn cameras (BWCs) on response-to-resistance and serious external complaints: Evidence from the Orlando Police Department (OPD) experience utilizing a randomized controlled experiment,” Journal of Criminal Justice 43 (2015): 480–486.
 
[4] Hedberg, Eric C., Charles M. Katz, and David E. Choate, “Body-worn cameras and citizen interactions with police officers: Estimating plausible effects given varying compliance levels,” Justice Quarterly 34 (2017): 627-651 
 
[5] White, Michael D., Gaub, Janne E., & Todak, Natalie, “Exploring the potential for body-worn cameras 
to reduce violence in police-citizen encounters” (forthcoming), Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, doi:10.1093/police/paw057.
 
 [6] Ariel, Barak, Alex Sutherland, Darren Henstock, Josh Young, Paul Drover, Jayne Sykes, Simon Magicks, and Ryan Henderson, “Wearing Body-Cameras Increases Assaults Against Officers and Do Not Reduce Police-Use of Force: Results from a Global Multisite Experiment,” European Journal of Criminology 13a (2016): 744-755.
 
[7] Yokum, David, Anita Ravishankar, and Alexander Coppock, “Evaluating the Effects of Police Body Worn Cameras: A Randomized Controlled Trial,” The Lab @ DC, Office of the City Administrator, Executive Office of the Mayor, Washington, DC, October 20, 2017.
 
[8] Sousa, William, James R. Coldren Jr., Denise Rodriguez, and Anthony A. Braga, “Research on Body Worn Cameras: Meeting the Challenges of Police Operations, Program Implementation, and Randomized Controlled Trial Designs,” Police Quarterly 0(0): 1–22.
 
[9] Office of Police Complaints, “Annual Report 2017,” Government of the District of Columbia, Police Complaints Board, 18-19.
 

This commentary represents a compilation of the thoughts and suggestions of a number of individuals involved in body-worn camera research and technical assistance, including the following: Michael White, PhD, Arizona State University; John D. Markovic, Bureau of Justice Assistance; Brett Chapman, PhD, National Institute of Justice; Denise Rodriguez, CNA; Craig Uchida, PhD, Justice and Security Strategies; and Anthony Braga, PhD, Northeastern University, among others.

BWC Implementation: Learning from the FY2015 BWC PIP Sites

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Office of Justice Programs (OJP), Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) launched the Body-Worn Camera Policy Implementation Project (PIP) in FY 2015 to assist law enforcement agencies with the enhancement or implementation of Body-Worn Camera (BWC) initiatives. The primary goals of PIP are to improve public safety, reduce crime, and improve public trust between police and the citizens they serve. This webinar showcased the progress and lessons learned from three FY15 BWC PIP sites.

June 25, 2017 - ICLEA presentation on BWCs

On June 25, 2017, Cheif Ed Book of Santa Fe College and First Sergeant Robert Bleyle of Syracuse University, delivered a presentation on the implementation of body-worn cameras at the IACLEA 59th Annual Conference & Exposition in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The presentation shared the ins and outs of how to implement a BWC program, including a focus on grant application, policy, equipment, and storage. The speakers also highlighted the resources and sample documents to help ensure alignment with best federal practices. 

A Spotlight on BWCs and Training

Implementing body-worn cameras in a police agency has an impact on virtually every key aspect of police operations, including training. With the growing adoption of body-worn cameras, the need for effective law enforcement training is paramount to help ensure that officers have the necessary knowledge and tools to confront the difficult tasks they encounter on a daily basis. This webinar discusses a list of considerations and resources presented by our panelist that will serve as helpful information in support of this challenge. In addition Dr.

Body-Worn Camera Training

The Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety at Arizona State University (ASU) has developed this facilitator’s guide and accompanying training slides as a resource for law enforcement agencies seeking to develop or modify their body‐worn camera (BWC) training programs. These training materials should be used only as reference documents for agencies developing and deploying BWCs. They are intended to provide guidance and are not designed for yearly continuing training or academy use.

BWC TTA Training Spotlight

Implementing body-worn cameras in a police agency has an impact on virtually every key aspect of police operations, including training, investigations, community relations, resource allocation, and more. With the growing adoption of body-worn cameras, the need for effective law enforcement training is paramount to help ensure that officers have the necessary knowledge and tools to confront the difficult tasks they encounter on a daily basis. The following considerations and resources will serve as helpful information in support of this challenge.

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