Body Camera Study Shows No Effect On Police Use of Force Or Citizen Complaints (npr.org)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Having police officers wear little cameras seems to have no discernible impact on citizen complaints or officers' use of force, at least in the nation's capital. That's the conclusion of a study performed as Washington, D.C., rolled out its huge camera program. The city has one of the largest forces in the country, with some 2,600 officers now wearing cameras on their collars or shirts. In the wake of high-profile shootings, many police departments have been rapidly adopting body-worn cameras, despite a dearth of solid research on how the technology can change policing. "We need science, rather than our speculations about it, to try to answer and understand what impacts the cameras are having," says David Yokum, director of the Lab @ DC. His group worked with local police officials to make sure that cameras were handed out in a way that let the researchers carefully compare officers who were randomly assigned to get cameras with those who were not. The study ran from June 2015 to last December. It's to be expected that these cameras might have little impact on the behavior of police officers in Washington, D.C., he says, because this particular force went through about a decade of federal oversight to help improve the department.

Comments

Re:Privatize the Police

[blindseer]

You are about 7 times as likely to be thrown in gaol in the land of the free than in China.

China is a prison. Their prison population is over one billion.

I'm not going to say that the USA is perfect, it's obviously not. Comparing the USA to China just does not follow. The Chinese government is not above killing political dissenters. They'll shoot people that speak out against the government. The government has developed a habit recently of destroying houses of worship. There are suspicions that they've done this with people still inside. There's no bill of rights there. There's no trial by jury. There's no elections, except those where the Communist candidate always wins.

I'll take my "wonderful things" about America over the "justice system" that China offers.

Re:Privatize the Police

[blindseer]

That's the problem, you're so obsessed with what everyone else is doing wrong that you can't see the wood from the trees.

I think you are so obsessed with comparing the incarceration rate with that of tyrannies that you can't fathom that perhaps we enjoy such prosperity and freedom in the USA because we have such a well functioning justice system. Did I say the USA was perfect? No, I did not. I am simply questioning the claims of a conspiracy to arbitrarily jail so many people. I'm sure a lot of people in prison right now don't belong there. I'm sure we could do better. I just find it hard to believe that private prisons have much of anything to do with the high rate of imprisonment.