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Police Complaints Drop 93 Percent After Deploying Body Cameras (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader writes:A study from Cambridge University documents an immense drop in complaints against police officers when their departments began using body cameras. But even more surprising is that the data suggests everyone is on their best behavior whether the cameras are present or not. The data was collected in seven police departments, and represents over 1.4 million hours logged by 1,847 officers in 2014 and 2015; the researchers published their data last week in the journal Criminal Justice and Behavior. Officers were randomly assigned to wear or not wear cameras week by week (about half would be wearing them any given week), and had to keep them on during all encounters. The authors used complaints against police as a metric because they're easy to measure, an established practice in most police forces and give a good ballpark of the frequency of problematic behavior. 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.
Convictions and and plea deals change A LOT with body cameras. Before, you put someone in a suit and train them to say "Yes Sir/No Sir" in front of the judge. Then give the judge and everyone else the dog and pony show of how he's an A student and wants to start a business taking care of puppies. This trick doesn't work so well when there is video of a raving lunatic high on drugs taking swings at the cops.
Red-light cameras are a tool for revenue generation with a growing body of evidence of their abuse. Police body cams however are supposed to be an impartial witness.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
The majority of studies show that accident rates go up, not down, when red-light cameras are put in place.
Accident rates may go up (or stay the same) but death rates go down.
The increase in accidents is less dangerous relatively slow speed rear end collisions, while
side on higher speed, and so more deadly, rates go down.
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/public...
I see an AC has already responded to you but let me add a comment since I've recently found some reports about New York City's stop & frisk.
Data archives for 2003 - 2015 are at http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/h...
Out of 5 MILLION stops in ~12 years, 25% were young black men but they make up NOT EVEN TWO PERCENT of NYC's population.
The percentage of stops annually where the suspect was found to be innocent was never below 75% and usually above 85%
Pain is merely failure leaving the body