Officer Receptivity to Body-Worn Cameras

Abstract

The growing public outrage in the USA and elsewhere over police-related deaths of people of colour has intensified the debate over body-worn cameras (BWCs). Unlike most research on officers’ experience-based acceptance of BWCs, this study examines receptivity: initial attitudes before learning whether or not they would be assigned a camera. Knowledge of receptivity is important for informing an agency’s roll-out of BWCs. It increases the likelihood of obtaining buy-in from its officers and helping to achieve positive outcomes from the technology. The analysis, based on the Technology Acceptance Model, focused on officer attitudes predicting receptivity while controlling for their demographic characteristics. Beliefs in the evidentiary value of BWCs, their role in increasing officer safety, and likely civilizing effects on community members increased receptivity significantly; fear of supervisory sanctions played no role. This article concludes with a discussion of policy implications.

Modeling Officer Perceptions of Body-worn Cameras: A National Survey

“…I did not ask about ethnicity of respondents. The proportion of White respondents in my sample is slightly lower than some published work, such as studies reporting 81.5% White officers , but is similar to the 75.3% reported by others (Bartholomew et al, 2021). The proportion of White respondents is very similar to national estimates (Hyland & Davis, 2019), which report 72% of officers are white, 11.4% Black, and 3.6% combined "other."…”

“…Police officers are already attuned to the threat that BWCs represent "fishing expeditions" by management (Bartholomew et al, 2021), to be used as tools of administrative oppression aimed at uncovering the slightest, most harmless policy missteps. This attitude may be exacerbated when facing new technology in the public workplace, as "there is a very strong correlation between one's sense of the intrusiveness of a technology and their views of its reasonableness for use in a public sector work environment" (Charbonneau & Doberstein, 2020).…”

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”: An in‐depth examination of police officer perceptions of body‐worn camera implementation and their relationship to policy, supervision, and training

“…Another supervisor talked about an incident at a local community center involving several officers, which she saw as an opportunity to review and discuss tactical errors and lessons learned. In fact, safety concerns were often paramount in the selection of BWC video footage for training (Bartholomew et al., 2021), and the infrequency of these kinds of critical events helps explain why BWC footage was seldom used for training. Supervisors might request an officer's footage as part of a 1‐on‐1 training opportunity, but this was rare and performed on an ad hoc basis, unless the supervisor was in the role of a field training officer.…”

Technology 3.0: Police Officers’ Perceptions Towards Technology Shifts

“…This paper focuses on technological transitions in a street-level organization, the police. By doing so, it uses extensive research in policing theory on technology receptivity and implementation (Ballucci et al, 2017; Bartholomew et al, 2021; Lum et al, 2017) to start addressing the questions in public management theory regarding the major technological transitions public organizations have been through and are about to go through (Desouza & Jacob, 2017; Sun & Medaglia, 2019). Then, using the case of police officers in the EMP in Brazil, which is a field example of police officers who do street policing with an environmental focus and who have transitioned from “street” to “screen” police, we aim to understand how this shift affects perceptions of discretion and burnout and how the use of “screen” technology predicts receptivity of “system” technologies.…”

“…Studying technological changes in the police can shed light on technology in public street-level organizations, a less-researched topic (Lipsky, 2010; Thomann et al, 2018; Tummers, 2017). It can do so using policing theory focusing on the receptivity of different technologies in the police, such as body-worn cameras (Bartholomew et al, 2021, Huff et al, 2018).…”