And false complaints.
> Specifics on how exactly this is happening are unclear. Is the officer less confrontational to begin with, avoiding escalation? Or are suspects and complainants more wary of their conduct? Is it some combination of the two, or are even more factors involved? To determine these things would be a far more complex and subtle piece of research, but the study does suggest that officer behavior is probably the most affected, and that other effects flow from that.
It would be interesting if they could capture how many complaints there are generally, and how many complaints in areas deploying body cameras are dis/proved due to video evidence.
And then filing a complaint to be told I was never arrested.
All I can say is. Not soon enough.
I'd say the main reason for the change in behaviour is it stops the lying scumbags lying.
Hopefully they don't have direct access to the footage so can't doctor it themselves.
You probably should not be 'intervening'.
Because it's pretty hard for a regular civilian to judge what the 'appropriate amount of force' is within certain limits.
I mean - obviously if the cop was just beating someone blind, you can 'intervene' - but aside from that - it's probably just best to whip out your iphone, record, let the officer know you are recording.
When you work in very difficult situations, and there are people filming you it can get dicey.
There are a lot of 'antagonists' out there who will do everything they can to prod cops into doing something they shouldn't, basically harassing them.
So it goes both ways.
Clearly - we should be allowed to video cops - but we also should not be allowed to harass or interfere with them unless there is something crazy happening.
But again - 'interfering' with a cop doing his job is a very risky thing because you never have the proper context, you don't know what is really going on. Physically assaulting a cop is grounds for him to fight back pretty aggressively.
Again in normal situations, it's not a problem, but there are tons of videos of cops trying to arrest someone, and then 'a mob' of friends trying to stop the cop.
Of course, they may feel their friend is being 'unjustly arrested' - but that's not up to you or I type thing. It can get pretty sketchy out there.
Check youtube. Cop tries to arrest, guy flees, cops put him down on the ground, 10 people try to harrass cop, pulling at his arms, pushing him back - very scary. Someone's going to get hurt.
It's a new dimension of civility and we all have to figure out the new social norms.
>In the year before the study, 1,539 complaints in total were filed against officers; at the end of the body camera experiment, the year had only yielded 113 complaints.
Search for "false" in the published study [0] yields 0 results.
0.http://cjb.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/09/21/009385481666...
But either way, it seems to work
Individuals attempting to make a complaint would now be informed that the incident was caught on camera. False complaints are likely dropped outright at that point.
The likely explination is that the police's behavior had changed and continued in the changed state after the camera was removed.
The behavior of newly detained suspects, those detained after body cameras were removed and so without experience of the body cameras in the past, could not have been changed by an experiment they had no part in nor knowledge of. Thus false complaints would continue at the same rate.
In weeks that no camera was worn complaints were still reduced.