Body-worn camera metadata

Washington University, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

Community trust is essential to effective policing. At all levels of government, the United States has made significant investments in police body-worn cameras (BWCs) as a way to build this trust. These cameras are a powerful technology capable of capturing and storing interactions between an officer and members of the community. They therefore promise unprecedented levels of police oversight. However, BWCs must be manually activated, and officers sometimes fail to activate them, even in situations where department policies dictate that they should have. This may undermine the effectiveness of BWCs, especially if non-activation is or appears to be an intentional strategy for officers to avoid oversight. It is therefore crucial to understand when and why officers activate BWCs, to study the consequences of non-activation, and to develop policies that can encourage more widespread activation. This study will take an innovative approach to existing police data in order to identify policing events recorded by a BWC. Policing events include calls for service, investigatory stops, arrests, and uses of force. The key information comes from metadata associated with each BWC recording. Metadata include the time of activation and the identity of the officer wearing the camera. By using probabilistic matching techniques to link metadata to records of policing events, the researchers can create the crucial BWC activation label. This study will use publicly available data from Chicago, which adopted BWCs starting in 2016. The first stage of research will focus on learning what characteristics of a policing event predict non-activation. These observations can then inform theories about why officers sometimes fail to activate. In the second stage, researchers will develop and test theoretical models of the environments and incentives faced by police officers when they make activation decisions. These models can provide insight into why BWC activation is not universal and how to get it there. The third stage of the research will use additional data on court cases and police misconduct investigations to learn how BWC activation, or lack thereof, affects the outcomes of those proceedings. To control for selection in BWC activation, we will use the quasi-experimental variation produced by supervisor assignments and Chicago’s gradual rollout of BWCs across police districts. Beyond a general understanding of BWC activation, this project has potential for broader impacts in the form of actionable insights about the Chicago Police Department and greater interdisciplinary collaboration. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.