Study: Police Body-Cams Reduce Unacceptable Use of Force

An anonymous reader writes: Incidents like the Michael Brown case have recently put police body-worn cameras into the public consciousness, but they're not a new idea to criminology experts. In fact, researchers at Cambridge began a study in 2012 using law enforcement in Rialto, California as a test bed. Their results are now in: "The experiment showed that evidence capture is just one output of body-worn video, and the technology is perhaps most effective at actually preventing escalation during police-public interactions: whether that's abusive behavior towards police or unnecessary use-of-force by police." The simple knowledge that both parties are being watched puts a damper on violence. "During the 12-month Rialto experiment, use-of-force by officers wearing cameras fell by 59% and reports against officers dropped by 87% against the previous year's figures." This was enough for the city of Rialto to decide it wants to move forward with body-worn cameras; hopefully the study will encourage other police departments as well.

Comments

Re:good news

[mrsquid0]

Then why should the police care about violence against you?

Re:Violence against police ...

[bondsbw]

For every bad cop we hear about, know that an entire fucking department has facilitated his behavior, making them every bit as worthless as the "bad" ones.

Even if this were true (which it is not), the number of police officers and police departments who do not condone this behavior FAR outweigh the number who do.