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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.
When I saw this earlier, I wondered if it's A) the small group of inherently bad cops curbing their bad behavior now that they are being monitored; or B) fewer [perceived] opportunities for dishonestly reported complaints. I imagine it is some combination of the two.
...when everything is a crime, everyone is a criminal.
Easy to verify: give randomly fake cameras to policemen where they know it's fake but people could not see it. If you still see the drop, then it's people stopping stupid behavior, if not then it's policemen behaving better.
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Citation? start here. While not being particularly effective at modifying driver behavior (see aforementioned link), they are also not impartial. While they may capture a vehicle and it's operator (maybe) in the middle of a crossing, they do not provide the context. They do not make the observation that the city rigged the yellow lights to be impractically short, they do not even make the observation that the light was in fact red prior to the driver entering the intersection.
This is in contrast to a police body cam which records the video and audio of a police encounter from start to conclusion providing full and usually easy to understand context.
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I wonder if this doesn't drive a secondary effect as well. It's not uncommon for a limited number of individuals to be the source of many police interactions. If a lot of those interactions are hostile, on the part of one or the other party, (or both) it creates a toxic relationship. If these interactions have a damper, such as a camera and some better behavior some percentage of the time, I wonder if that doesn't have a calming effect.
Whether or not it's my fault, if I'm getting harassed by the cops all the time, I'm likely going to be an asshole when I see them. But if half the time they are friendly and respectful, just doing their job, it dampens the hate. If half of the time I see that I'm on camera and I bite my tongue and say, "Yeah, sure officer. No problems here." those officers are less fired up and cautious the next time we meet. I could easily see this being a positive behavior feedback loop, where before we had a negative behavior feedback loop.
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Want to blow a SJW's mind?
All the police departments with the BLM-related accusations and riots are run by Democrats, who also run the mayor's office, etc.. Most are also heavily black police forces, which is why it keeps being black cops being accused of racist behavior in some of these BLM "incidents".
The reason most police are union members is also related... their bosses love their union political contributors/supporters and the police are required to join in order to work in left-wing run cities.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Troll alert. This is apples and rotten oranges...
These body cameras are intrusive and over the top when it comes to personal privacy, but if you believe the news reports coming out of police departments, cops actually like them after having to wear them for a while. No more BS, "he said/she said" issues; And I'm sure that cops love not having to deal with paperwork over unfounded cop complaints.
OTOH, red light cameras (and speed cameras) were put in place as a "sin tax" revenue grab by government officials/councilmen/legislators that usually had personal vendettas against rude/aggressive drivers. Those naive officials were easy prey for the real bandits - companies like ATS and Redflex, whose CEO was bribing city officials to get the revenue generators installed in as many places as possible.
Body cameras: Enormous drop in police complaints, and both sides like the extra clarity they provide to litigious and/or life or death situations. Red light cameras: mixed safety results, bogged-down municipal courts, confusion, outright corruption, and even murder generation.
Of course these days, who cares about facts. Perception is reality...
"Now is where SJWs yell that % of criminal population is a 'racist statistic'."
What about the statistic that minorities are stopped, ticketes or incarcerated at much higher rates for the same non-violent offenses?
Is that racist? Against whom?
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