Look there! The effect of perspective, attention, and instructions on how people understand recorded police encounters

Abstract

Now more than ever, body cameras, surveillance footage, dash-cam footage, and bystanders with phones enable people to see for themselves officer and civilian behavior and determine the justifiability of officers' actions. This paper examines whether the camera perspective from which people watch police encounters influences the conclusions that people draw. Consistent with recent findings showing that body camera footage leads people to perceive officers' actions as less intentional (Turner, Caruso, Dilich, & Roese, 2019), our first study demonstrates that participants who watched body-camera footage, compared with people who watched surveillance footage of the same encounter, perceived the officer's behavior as being more justified and made more lenient punishment decisions. In our second study, only one of the four police encounters that participants watched led participants to perceive the officer more favorably when they watched body-camera footage compared with bystander footage. Our results demonstrate that some body-camera footage-specifically videos that capture an officer using his or her body to apprehend a civilian-can lead to biased perceptions of police encounters that benefit the officer. Our findings suggest that this occurs because:(i) in body-camera footage, the civilian is the more easily visible figure, thus making less salient the officer's role in the encounter; and (ii) the body camera-attached to an officer's uniform-is unable to adequately capture certain use of force movements that are important in determining an officer's intent.

More than meets the eye: Officer actions and civilian behavioral health shape appraisals of police footage.

“…Generally, the more strongly participants identified with police, the more they viewed the officer favorably and the less they agreed that he should be punished. These results comport with a growing literature showing that people’s preexisting beliefs about police are strong predictors of the types of conclusions people draw from police footage (Granot et al, 2014; Jones et al, 2017, 2019; Reynolds et al, 2018). The fact that camera footage does not reduce polarization but rather can lead people to be more confident in their judgments (Sommers, 2015) could be a consequence of the emotional load of videos.…”

“…Furthermore, the extent to which people identify with police and view policing as a legitimate institution is associated with the conclusions people form about police encounters. Individuals who more strongly identify with the police, as opposed to less, view officer behavior more positively and civilians more negatively when they watch footage of an incident, and they are also less likely to punish officers (Jones et al, 2017(Jones et al, , 2019Sommers, 2015). Similarly, individuals who viewed police as more legitimate, as opposed to less, believed that an officer shooting depicted via video recording was more justified (Reynolds et al, 2018).…”

The thin blue waveform: Racial disparities in officer prosody undermine institutional trust in the police.

“…BWCs capture a rapidly increasing number of encounters; by some estimates, about half of all U.S. law enforcement agencies (Hyland, 2018), and 97% of major city police departments (Major Cities Chiefs Major County Sheriffs, 2015) have adopted or plan to adopt these devices. The bulk of scientific research concerns either the ambiguities of assigning blame from BWC video recordings (Jones et al, 2017, 2019; Turner et al, 2019), or whether the presence of BWCs themselves affects officer behavior (Ariel et al, 2015; cf. Yokum et al, 2019).…”

I Can’t Breathe: How Digital Video Becomes an Emancipatory Technology

“…Raw videos tend to engender empathy for whoever embodies that view, whether it is a Police bodycam or a phone held by a victim. Research shows that people consider police actions less intentional and more justified when police bodycams document a situation [24]. The same can be said for videos filmed from the victim's perspective.…”