A study that examined the effects body worn cameras (BWCs) have on police officers in Washington, D.C. has been making the rounds recently. The study's findings have reinvigorated discussions about BWCs, not least because of its counterintuitive finding that BWCs did not have a statistically significant effect on officers' use of force or civilian complaints against the police. This finding is worth considering, but the study shouldn't deter local officials from mandating police BWCs. Even if they don't change police officers' behavior, BWCs can, with the right policies in place, provide a much-needed increase in police accountability and transparency. During the study, officers with the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia were randomly assigned BWCs. Researchers with The Lab @DC, a study team in the D.C. mayor's office, and Yale University examined use of force incidents and complaints against police officers. The study did not seek to measure the impact of BWCs' other benefits such as accountability, transparency, and protection for officers, but rather narrowly measured their impact. In addition to examining how often police officers use force and are the subject of complaints, researchers also studied police discretion and the judicial outcomes related to police charges. You might expect that officers improved their behavior when they were wearing BWCs. After all, if you know that you're being filmed you have plenty of incentives to be on your best behavior, whether you're an officer or a resident. And yet, the recent D.C. body camera study showed that BWCs had no statistically significant effect on officers' behavior. This may strike many as odd. But we shouldn't forget the limitations that restrict researchers looking into the effects of BWCs. Researchers cannot, for instance, insist that when an officer wearing a BWC calls for backup that only officers also wearing BWCs respond. In a situation where two officers are interacting with a resident and only one of the officers is wearing a BWC there is a good chance that the BWC will influence the behavior of the officer not wearing the BWC. The researchers do not think, however, that this spillover effect affected the results of the experiment. The study notes that there was no statistically significant difference between officer behavior pre- and post-BWC deployment, as the two graphs from the study below show:
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