An Increase in Professionalism
A common refrain among officers who’ve seen the implementation of the camera during their career is that it’s helped shape police behavior for the better, especially when the officers are approaching those they suspect of criminal wrongdoing.
Lamont Quarker, a captain with the Rialto Police Department who was working patrol when his department took part in the aforementioned pilot study, says it was hard before body cameras to give the appropriate level of grace when dealing with citizens who may or may not have committed crime.
“We had a lot of gang activity,” before body cameras, Quarker explains to A&E Crime + Investigation. “A lot of violent crime. And so sometimes the way that officers went about pro-active policing could alienate part of the community."
After body cameras were implemented, Quarker says the police’s posture changed.
“It made me a lot more deliberate in the way I spoke with people,” he continues. “Before body cams, an officer [may have used] coarse language instead of maintaining professionalism—myself included. If someone was being unprofessional with me, it was very easy to not be as patient as I should be. But when the camera goes on, it’s just that ever-present reminder that you are being recorded and that anything you say or do is going to be looked at after.”
During the 12-month study of body cameras worn by Rialto’s police department, camera-wearing officers used force 59% less of the time, and civilian complaints against officers dropped by 87%.
“It forced both sides of the interaction to keep each other honest,” Quarker says.
Logistics and Limitations
While there’s broad use of body cameras in police departments today, the departments that pioneered this work had a lot of problems to solve.
Chief among those is “managing expectations,” says Frank Scalise, a retired police captain from the Spokane, Wash., police department who led a study about body cameras for his department in 2012.
He tells A&E Crime + Investigation that the footage only represents “one perspective, one angle.” Scalise, whose study became the basis for the book Police Body Cameras: What Are the Obstacles to Implementing Their Use, and What Is Their Potential Impact?, has since gone on to consult other police departments on the implementation of the cameras, and he says he’s always mindful to explain to civilians that, “They won’t suddenly have a Sunday Ticket version of their local police department.”
There are other elements to consider too, Scalise explains, such as whether a department decides to implement a camera worn on the head or chest, or whether the camera is recording at all times or is officer-activated. But in all cases, the camera is always limited by the inherent close-proximity nature of so many higher-stakes incidents between police and suspects.
“If I arrest you and we have a physical confrontation, it becomes a grappling situation,” Scalise says. “And then all you really see is a whole lot of nothing, because someone’s shoulder is pushed up against the camera.”
He adds, “When something new comes along, people think it’s going to resolve all of the issues with a situation. And that’s just not the case. When pepper spray came out, they thought that people wouldn’t fight back or resist arrest anymore. And it was effective–with some people. And with others, it didn’t matter at all. The body camera is just one more tool.”
Some early advocates for police-worn body cameras thought cameras could help safeguard civilians against police misconduct. But it also works in the police’s favor, helping inoculate officers against false allegations of misbehavior.
Today, Dilworth is glad to have that camera on, in part because he can use it to show the difficult police work is that he does, recounting a recent situation in which officers responded to a shooting between two civilians that ultimately left one young man dead.
“The things we were going through to try to save this individual’s life: CPR, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Trying to calm down bystanders. Trying to calm down the family. Trying to not only save the individual’s life but also disbanding officers out to try to arrest the suspect at the same time,” Dilworth says. “Some people on Facebook said, ‘The police didn’t do enough. They just let him die.’ But the cameras give perspective.”
He adds that the trust between the Ferguson community and police is starting to rebuild now—and that the cameras are at the forefront of that change.
“It’s not the camera that changed people’s perspective on us,” Dilworth says. “It was our culture. The way we operated.” That culture, he notes, wouldn’t have changed if the police hadn’t begun recording themselves.
