Study: Police wearing body cameras use less force

The Journal of Quantitative Criminology recently published the study, which detailed the first controlled and much-discussed experiment to ask whether body-worn cameras could reduce the prevalence of police use-of-force or the number of complaints filed against police.

Conducted by the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology, the study, based on a 12-month trial in Rialto, California, found that body-worn cameras reduced the use of force by roughly 50 percent, says Dr. Barak Ariel, the lead author. Complaints against police also fell 90 percent during the study period compared with the previous year.

“This is a promising tool for police officers, which is likely to be a game changer not only for the professionalization of policing, but in terms of police-public relations,” says Ariel, an assistant professor at the Institute of Criminology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a lecturer in Experimental Criminology at the University of Cambridge in England.