Measuring public perception of police body cameras

The Winnipeg Police Service is beginning its long-awaited body-worn camera (BWC) pilot project. The pilot will include 40 front-line officers who will wear the devices for the next six months.

Winnipeg police will be gathering community feedback through public forums and a public perception survey in order “to ensure that the pilot is informed by meaningful input.”

The public perception survey asks respondents to indicate their level of agreement with a series of statements, on a scale of strongly agree to strongly disagree — a frequent and familiar tool for surveys, known as a Likert scale. There is also an option to indicate no opinion. The survey of opinions about body cameras begins with five basic profile questions followed by 18 Likert scale statements and concludes with a short space for additional comments.

From a research standpoint, there are fundamental flaws with the survey that make it incapable of producing meaningful results that would inform a body camera pilot in Winnipeg.

Foremost, surveying public opinions concerning beliefs about the effectiveness of body cameras is not very useful.

Are public perceptions regarding the effectiveness of cancer care useful for the actual treatment of the disease? Most certainly not. This is why we rely on the expertise of medical professionals such as oncologists, and not public opinion, to manage cancer.

Why should the use and management of body cameras be any different?

The public may believe in the ability of body cameras to produce desired results, but beliefs are not evidence of the cameras producing results.

Body cameras have been studied a considerable amount over much of the last decade and the scientific research consensus regarding the efficacy of the devices is inconsistent.

A highly cited systemic review by distinguished university professor Cynthia Lum and her colleagues revealed “substantial uncertainty” across studies concerning whether body cameras can reduce officer use of force and found that the devices “do not seem to affect other police and citizen behaviours in a consistent manner.”

Oddly, one of the statements on the public perception survey asks respondents to agree or disagree with the following: “Body-worn cameras reduce police officers’ use-of-force during interactions.” Frankly, members of the public have not collected the systematic evidence that would prove or disprove this statement. Simply agreeing or disagreeing will not miraculously make it so.

In their review of studies on body cameras, Professor Lum and colleagues also note that “research has not directly addressed whether BWCs can strengthen police accountability.”

According to the WPS, the body camera pilot will evaluate the “potential to support transparency (and) accountability … in a way that meets the needs of the community,” which brings us back to another glaring issue with the public perception survey.

Accountability and transparency are terms without clearly defined and shared meanings and are not typically measured in research. In our book, Police Body-Worn Cameras: Media and the New Discourse of Police Reform, we illustrate that the basic problem is that the concepts of transparency and accountability operate on taken-for-granted assumptions and can mean different things to different interest groups that include police officials, oversight agencies, government representatives, activists, journalists and individuals.

To measure accountability and transparency would first require a clear definition and operationalization of these concepts, something the Winnipeg police public perception survey does not do. In other words, what would be the evidence that accountability and transparency had been achieved? Instead, the survey asks respondents to indicate their level of agreement to statements like: “Body-worn cameras improve accountability for police officers” and “Body-worn cameras improve transparency in police interactions with the public.” Once again, beliefs based on no data are not evidence.

In their research paper A state-of-the-art review on police accountability criminology professor Yinthe Feys and colleagues note that “a large amount of literature” has been written on police accountability “using different definitions.” If researchers cannot even come to a consensus of what police accountability is, it is unclear how surveying public opinions of police accountability related to body cameras would meet community needs.

Transparency is typically characterized by visibility. Body camera footage is almost never publicly shared in Canada due to strict federal privacy legislation. What this means is that Winnipeggers can expect to never see body camera footage of Winnipeg police interactions with the public, thus rendering the statement measuring opinions of transparency moot.

Beyond the matter of visibly, criminologist Rob Mawby suggests that transparency also ought to include “an openness” by police to explain how the institutional structure and decision-making process operate. Law professor Erik Luna has referred to such a strategy as “transparent policing,” an approach that includes allowing the public to observe and assess police policy decisions and involve citizens in decisions.

Body cameras are only as good as their policies.

The Winnipeg police must therefore release and solicit public feedback on the policy that governs their use of body cameras.

Doing so would provide a baseline expectation of how these cameras are going to work and would at the very least represent a practical step toward some semblance of accountability and transparency related to the use of body cameras.

Christopher J. Schneider is professor of sociology at Brandon University. His most recent book (with Erick Laming) is Police Body-Worn Cameras: Media and the New Discourse of Police Reform.