Study Finds That Cops Wearing Body Cameras Are Actually More Likely To Kill Civilians

In July 2015, U.S. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina introduced the Safer Officers and Safer Citizens Act of 2015 which proposed to offer $100mm a year for 5 years to local police agencies to purchase body cameras for their officers.  Scott became highly vocal in his support of body cameras after an unarmed, 50 year old black man from his district was killed by a white officer. 

There is just one small problem with the bill.  A recent study by Temple University researchers found that wearing body cameras was actually associated with a 3.64% increase in fatal shootings of civilians by police officers.  Perhaps even more surprising is that no increase in fatalities was noticed in police interactions with Whites/Asians but police were found to be 3.68% more likely to kill Blacks/Hispanics while wearing body cameras.  The study suggests that police officers are actually more likely to pull the trigger if they have video evidence to support their use of force. 

Per the study (which can be read in its entirety below):

Surprisingly, we found that the use of wearable video cameras is associated with a 3.64% increase in shooting-deaths of civilians by the police. We explain that video recordings collected during a violent encounter with a civilian can be used in favor of a police officer as evidence that justifies the shooting. Aware of this evidence, the officer may become less reluctant to engage in the use of deadly force. We conducted more in-depth analyses with incident circumstances (e.g. whether a subject was armed) and demographics of victims (e.g. race, age), and we obtained more intriguing findings. Notably, the above-mentioned effect of technology use on fatal shootings is more pronounced for (a) African American or Hispanic victims than Whites or Asians and (b) for armed suspects than unarmed civilians.

The study suggests that a smarter approach would be to arm police with more data.  The study found that providing police officers with improved intelligence reports via smartphones actually reduced fatal shootings by 2.46%

Smartphone use by officers is also associated with a 2.46% reduction in the shooting-deaths of civilians. This is consistent with our theoretical prediction (Proposition 1) that crime intelligence obtained by statistical analyses and access to the intelligence via smartphones lead to a decrease in fatal shootings by the police. In contrast, the number of crime records (Records) and the categories of data accessible by patrol officers (Access) are not significantly related to the incidents of civilian deaths.

Don’t you just hate it when data gets in the way of legislation?