Program Goals
Police body-worn cameras have been adopted by departments across the country in response to citizen demands for greater accountability and increased transparency of officer actions. In 2016 the Boston, Massachusetts, Police Department implemented a pilot body-worn camera program to inform a larger implementation of the technology on its patrol force. The goal of body-worn cameras is to improve the civility of police–citizen interactions and police officer work activities.
Program Activities/Key Personnel
The Boston Police Department’s body-worn camera pilot aimed to answer policy questions about how the system would operate when implemented across the department’s 2,100 officers, and to address concerns of officers and the community about the use of the technology (Braga et al. 2018). The department developed and implemented a policy to guide the officers’ use of the body-worn camera technology during the pilot program. These policies included a requirement that officers wearing the cameras notify citizens that the interaction was being video-recorded at the outset of the encounter; guidelines to seek consent from citizens before recording in residences during non-warrant or emergency situations; and detailed guidelines on the occurrences when video-recording was mandatory during policing duties, such as during a) vehicle stops, b) investigative person stops, c) all dispatched calls for service involving contact with civilians, d) initial responses by patrol officers, e) searches of persons incident to arrest, f) canine searches, g) incidents of emergency and pursuit driving, h) when an officer reasonably believes a crowd control incident may result in unlawful activity, and i) any civilian contact that becomes adversarial, including a use-of-force incident. All officers wearing body-worn cameras and all supervisors were required to attend department-approved training on the operation of the system.
The pilot implementation occurred over a 1-year period in 5 of the 11 police districts throughout the city, and with plainclothes officers in the Youth Violence Strike Force who used proactive policing tactics to prevent outbreaks of gang violence (Braga et al. 2018).
Program Theory
Two theoretical perspectives that support the use of police body-worn cameras are deterrence and public self-awareness theories (Ariel, Farrar, and Sutherland 2015). Deterrence theory posits that individuals refrain from committing crimes when they perceive the costs of illegal acts to exceed the benefits of those acts (Zimring and Hawkins 1973). The possibility of police body-worn cameras capturing inappropriate or illegal behaviors on video during encounters may cause a deterrent effect for both officers and citizens, by modifying their perceptions of detection and punishment risks (Ariel et al. 2017), especially if the video is released and “goes viral.” Further, this deterrent effect could generate spillover benefits, even among officers not outfitted with the cameras, by modifying the objective risk of their antisocial or illegal behavior being recorded by another officer and subsequently detected by department supervisors.
Public self-awareness theory suggests that people are more likely to compare their immediate behaviors to established internal social norms, comply with rules, and exhibit socially desirable behavior when they know they are being observed (Duval and Wicklund 1972). Therefore, the presence of body-worn cameras may cause police officers and citizens to compare their behavior to expected social norms and standards and may also spur behaviors such as treating others in respectful and procedurally just ways (Ariel, Farrar, and Sutherland 2015; Demir et al. 2018). Public self-awareness theory also lends support to a spillover benefit of body-worn cameras on officers that do not wear them, suggesting that the presence of cameras may cause other officers to behave in ways consistent with societal norms (that is, “this is how everyone is supposed to act”) [Silver et al. 2017].
