Making sense of body-worn cameras in a police organization: a technological frames analysis

Body-Worn Cameras and Internal Accountability at a Police Agency

“…It was large enough to have specialized units, multi-rank bureaucratic structure, and employed some civilian staff (Reaves, 2015). Moreover, smaller agencies are more likely to implement body cameras than larger ones (Strom, 2017), while most of the body-worn camera research have focused on larger police organizations (Koen & Willis, 2019).…”

“…Agencies must be cautious of how they formulate policy and use body-worn cameras for the purposes of accountability as it could open opportunity for tremendous time and resource constraints (Koen et al, 2018) and/or be detrimental to generating or maintaining line-level officer buy-in (Gaub et al, 2016;Koen & Willis, 2019).…”

“…Relative advantage pertains to the extent that an innovation is thought to be better than previous practices or ideas (Rogers, 2003). Body-worn cameras stand to offer significant relative advantage to police agencies in terms of time savings, immediate rewards, and improve social prestige as the footage from the devices could improve community relations, documentation, training, and complaints investigations (Koen et al, 2018;Koen & Willis, 2019;Lum et al, 2019;White, 2014). For example, when a citizen brings a complaint to a police agency, internal investigations can last for quite some time as internal affairs investigators collect evidence and interview all relevant parties (Koen et al, 2018).…”

“…If a technology is straightforward and can be navigated with relative ease, it is more likely to be adopted, this is especially true if it is in the form of hardware (Rogers, 2003), much like body-worn cameras. Perceptual studies regarding body-worn cameras have found that police officers, for the most part, find body-worn cameras to be easy to use (Gaub, Choate, Todak, Katz, & White, 2016;Koen & Willis, 2019;Lum et al, 2019).…”

“…Lastly, Rogers (2003) posits that the extent to which people can see the results of an innovation, or observability, can affect the rate at which that innovation diffuses across a social network. The impacts of body-worn cameras have been rather resounding, especially in terms of reductions in citizen complaints and is especially an outcome that police managers have emphasized (Koen & Willis, 2019). Lum et al (2019) in their systematic review identified 18 experimental or quasi-experimental studies that have investigated body-worn camera impacts on citizen complaint statistics since 2012 found that this technology is related to fewer citizen complaints.…”