Police cameras would deter police from acting irrationally

The argument

The case here rests on a controlled comparison rather than on anecdote. A randomised control trial enrolled 400 LVMPD officers and divided them in two: half were made to wear body cameras, and the other half served as a control group and were not. Because the two halves were formed by random assignment, they can be treated as alike in the ways that usually confound such comparisons, so differences appearing over the following year can reasonably be attributed to the cameras themselves rather than to the kind of officer in each group. A year into the trial the differences were substantial. Complaints against camera-wearing officers fell by 30%, while complaints against officers without cameras fell by only 5%. Use of force by officers with cameras fell by 37%; among officers without cameras it rose by 4%. Proponents stress the shape of that last pair of figures in particular, because the comparison is not between improvement and stagnation but between a sharp fall and an actual increase, which makes it harder to explain the result as a general trend that happened to coincide with the trial. The mechanism proponents infer is deterrence through documentation. An officer who knows an encounter is being recorded also knows that any later account of it will be checked against footage rather than settled by competing testimony, and that knowledge is present at the moment of decision, when force is being contemplated. The same recording cuts both ways on complaints, discouraging conduct that would not survive review and discouraging allegations that footage would contradict. On this view the camera need not actually be watched to do its work; the standing possibility that it will be watched is enough to make an irrational or excessive response costlier to the officer than a measured one, which is what the reduction in use of force reflects.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Despite the introductions of body cameras, police brutality and the irrational use of force has not served as a deterrent. George Floyd was in police custody when he was murdered. The Minneapolis Police Department confirmed that the body cameras were on at the time of the murder. It was not the bodycam, but the footage of bystanders that revealed how George Floyd died. This suggests that the cameras themselves are not the silver bullet, it depends on how they are used by the police. The current rules on the release of the footage are varied, and over the years a lot of footage has not released by departments despite requests. Research on the use of force has been mixed. Although some studies suggest that the use of force decreases in the absence of a camera, other studies suggest that there is no significant difference in the use of force exhibited by police whether or not they are wearing cameras. This suggests that police cameras alone have very limited impact on the irrational behaviours capable of being exhibited by police, such as the use of excessive force as seen in George Floyd's case.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A single trial in one department establishes what happened among those 400 officers, not what body cameras do generally. [Rejecting P2] The percentages are reported without absolute numbers or any measure of significance, and the control group's 4% rise in use of force is as consistent with ordinary year-to-year variation as with an effect of going uncameraed. [Rejecting P3] The counter-argument notes that the wider research is mixed, with some studies finding no significant difference, and that cameras change nothing where footage is withheld: the officers involved in George Floyd's death were wearing activated cameras, and it was bystander video that established what happened. Any deterrent effect therefore depends on the rules governing recording and release, which the premise does not address.