A drop in false complaints could be a factor, but the study tentatively weighs the officer behavior the bigger change:
> Specifics on how exactly this is happening are unclear. Is the officer less confrontational to begin with, avoiding escalation? Or are suspects and complainants more wary of their conduct? Is it some combination of the two, or are even more factors involved? To determine these things would be a far more complex and subtle piece of research, but the study does suggest that officer behavior is probably the most affected, and that other effects flow from that.
It would be interesting if they could capture how many complaints there are generally, and how many complaints in areas deploying body cameras are dis/proved due to video evidence.
Because it's pretty hard for a regular civilian to judge what the 'appropriate amount of force' is within certain limits.
I mean - obviously if the cop was just beating someone blind, you can 'intervene' - but aside from that - it's probably just best to whip out your iphone, record, let the officer know you are recording.
Here in Massachusetts, a lot of officers would consider recording with your phone intervening, and they would punish you for it. It took several cases of the state supreme court ruling that this was NOT OK before police finally curbed their behavior and stopped (or reduced greatly) their hassling of people recording. I think the court even got snarky about it at one point, saying something like "Despite our previous clarifications on this issue, police continue to violate citizens rights" or something similar.
It's not unreasonable for cops to be concerned by it - a lot of people were 'up in the cops' face about it - not just casual recording.
When you work in very difficult situations, and there are people filming you it can get dicey.
There are a lot of 'antagonists' out there who will do everything they can to prod cops into doing something they shouldn't, basically harassing them.
So it goes both ways.
Clearly - we should be allowed to video cops - but we also should not be allowed to harass or interfere with them unless there is something crazy happening.
But again - 'interfering' with a cop doing his job is a very risky thing because you never have the proper context, you don't know what is really going on. Physically assaulting a cop is grounds for him to fight back pretty aggressively.
Again in normal situations, it's not a problem, but there are tons of videos of cops trying to arrest someone, and then 'a mob' of friends trying to stop the cop.
Of course, they may feel their friend is being 'unjustly arrested' - but that's not up to you or I type thing. It can get pretty sketchy out there.
Check youtube. Cop tries to arrest, guy flees, cops put him down on the ground, 10 people try to harrass cop, pulling at his arms, pushing him back - very scary. Someone's going to get hurt.
It's a new dimension of civility and we all have to figure out the new social norms.
Though that might be true, the study didn't look into the falsehood of the complaints.
>In the year before the study, 1,539 complaints in total were filed against officers; at the end of the body camera experiment, the year had only yielded 113 complaints.
Search for "false" in the published study [0] yields 0 results.
Then the study didn't even consider the possibility of false complaints? From the frequency it is mentioned here it seems like a possible hypothesis that should have been mentioned as not a factor if it was proved out to not be.
That too would be a good result although given that complaints remained lower after the cameras were removed, it would seem false complaints weren't the problem.
Individuals attempting to make a complaint would now be informed that the incident was caught on camera. False complaints are likely dropped outright at that point.
After wearing cameras, police then stopped wearing them but complaints continues to be low even when there were no cameras.
The likely explination is that the police's behavior had changed and continued in the changed state after the camera was removed.
The behavior of newly detained suspects, those detained after body cameras were removed and so without experience of the body cameras in the past, could not have been changed by an experiment they had no part in nor knowledge of. Thus false complaints would continue at the same rate.
>The devices and recordings can be owned and used (and conveniently redacted) only by the authorities.
I see no reason why that has to be the case. There should be a startup whose entire purpose is gathering and posting surveillance on the police - a Wikileaks of law enforcement. Something that can't be altered or redacted by any government.
When Google Glass came out, people were quick to dismiss the fears people had that it represented a paradigm shift in surveillance, because everyone had a smartphone with a camera and microphone already.
We have the ability to turn the surveillance state against itself, So why aren't we? We should already be recording the police at all times and streaming it to the web. Why even give the state a choice in the matter?
