Assessing the Utility of Body-Worn Cameras for Collegiate Police Agencies

• Date: 01 March 2022
• Author: Janne E. Gaub
• DOI: 10.1177/10986111211037586
• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Assessing the Utility of

Body-Worn Cameras

for Collegiate Police

Agencies

Janne E. Gaub

Abstract

Nearly all scholarship on body-worn cameras (BWCs) has focused on municipal

police departments, as they comprise a majority of sworn agencies. Given the

unique environment of collegiate law enforcement agencies, however, it is possible

that their paths to BWCs—and the benefits and challenges they experience—vary

from that of more traditional agencies. Using a survey of 126 collegiate police depart-

ments and in-depth interviews with 15 collegiate police executives, this study

describes their goals, challenges, and benefits related to BWCs. Importantly, it

also describes the decision-making of agencies that chose not to implement

BWCs, giving voice to an understudied population and providing guidance to special

agencies in making the decision to adopt BWCs. The most notable benefits and

challenges interrelate with their placement as part of institutions of higher education,

such as the impact of collegiate privacy concerns (e.g., FERPA) and the utility of BWC

footage in both law enforcement and educational processes.

Keywords

police, body-worn cameras (BWCs), higher education, implementation, police

technology

Department of Criminal Justice & Criminology, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte,

United States

Corresponding Author:

Janne E. Gaub, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, University of North Carolina at

Charlotte, 9201 University City Blvd., Charlotte, NC 28223, United States.

Email: jgaub@uncc.edu

Police Quarterly

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DOI: 10.1177/10986111211037586

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2022, Vol. 25(1) 118 –148

Gaub 119

Introduction

While body-worn cameras (BWCs) are new technology in the broader picture of

policing, they have a longer history than most people realize. Widespread imple-

mentation of BWCs in the United States began in 2014–2015, though some

agencies, especially in Canada and the United Kingdom, had begun implement-

ing them nearly a decade earlier. In fact, the 2013 Law Enforcement

Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey shows roughly

one-third of American police agencies had a BWC program, though the vast

majority were smaller scale, pilot versions (Reaves, 2015b). In contrast, by 2016,

one-half of all agencies and 80% of agencies with more than 500 sworn person-

nel had BWCs, and most had completed full implementation or were in process

of doing so (Hyland, 2018a). Another study found that in 2018 about 60% of

agencies with more than 100 sworn personnel had BWCs, compared to 47% of

smaller agencies (Nix et al., 2020).

Interwoven with this history are the repeated stories emphasizing the need for

such accountability measures. The death of Michael Brown in Ferguson (MO)—

and the ensuing civil unrest and surging popularity of the Black Lives Matter

movement—is often considered the “line in the sand” marking the beginning of

a renewed call for police reform and accountability, including BWCs, but the

story begins long before that and has continued ever since. Nearly all of these

interactions have occurred between black citizens (primarily young men) and

police officers employed by municipal police departments, unsurprising since the

majority of American law enforcement agencies are municipal. But there are

notable examples of incidents involving other types of agencies, including police

departments servicing college and university campuses. For example, University

of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing was charged with murder in the death

of Samuel Dubose based largely on the footage from his own BWC (Ortiz,

2015). A non-lethal encounter in 2014 between an Arizona State University

police officer and Ersula Ore (a black female professor at the school) made

national headlines after released dashboard camera footage sparked outrage

of the professor’s seemingly excessive treatment for jaywalking (Jaschik, 2014).

It is important that every facet of law enforcement be informed and molded

by evidence-based practice. Unfortunately, the evidence in policing research is

nearly always derived from municipal police agencies, just as it is skewed to

favor medium/large-sized agencies over small ones and urban agencies over

suburban or rural ones. While these trends make sense for several reasons,

they present a more limited view of the contexts in which strategies, programs,

or technology may or may not work and why. This tendency is no different in

the BWC literature. Since 2014, there has been a proliferation of research on

police use of BWCs, from only five published studies (White, 2014) to over 120

by January 2020 (Gaub & White, 2020; see also Lum et al., 2020; Lum et al.,

2019), yet the research has focused on municipal law enforcement agencies with

2Police Quarterly 24(4)