Do body‐worn cameras reduce disparities in police behavior in minority communities? Evidence of nuanced influences across Black and Hispanic neighborhoods

• Published date: 01 August 2022
• Author: Jessica Huff
• Date: 01 August 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12590

DOI: 10.1111/1745-9133 .12590

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Do body-worn cameras reduce disparities

in police behavior in minority communities?

Evidence of nuanced influences across Black

and Hispanic neighborhoods

Jessica Huff

School of Criminology and Criminal

Justice, University of Nebraska Omaha,

Omaha, Nebraska, USA

Correspondence

Jessica Huff, School of Criminology and

Criminal Justice, University of Nebraska

Omaha, 218 CPACS,6001 Dodge St,

Omaha, NE 68182, USA.

Email: jessiehuff@unomaha.edu

Funding information

Bureau of Justice Assistance,

Grant/AwardNumber: 2015-WY-BX-0004

Abstract

Research Summary: The adoption of body-worn cam-

eras (BWCs) is often promoted in response to content-

ious police use of force incidents involving minor-

ity civilians. BWCs are expected to improve polic-

ing outcomes by enhancing accountability, although

researchers have yet to determine whether BWCs can

reduce racial/ethnic disparities. I examine whether

BWCs mitigate the influence of neighborhood racial/

ethnic context on arrests and use of force using cross-

classified logistic regression models to examine the out-

comes of 900,000+police–civilian contacts in Phoenix.

Arrests were significantly more likely to occur in His-

panic and Black neighborhoods before and after BWC

deployment, even accounting for situational, officer,

and neighborhood characteristics. When BWCs were

activated in Black neighborhoods, the odds of arrest

decreased by 38%. However,BWCs did not moderate the

influence of neighborhood percentage of Hispanic on

arrest. The neighborhood racial/ethnic context was not

associated with the use of force pre- or post-BWCdeploy-

ment.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and repro-

duction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2022 The Authors. Criminology & Public Policypublished by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society of Criminology.

Criminology & Public Policy. 2022;21:671–711. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/capp 671

672 HUFF

Policy Implications: Although BWCs have been asso-

ciated with several positive outcomes, their ability to

reduce racial/ethnic disparities appears to be overstated.

As such, more targeted approaches to reducing dis-

parities in policing outcomes are needed. For exam-

ple, leveraging the information collected through BWCs

could facilitate enhanced supervision to identify officers

engaging in racially disparate practices and hold them

accountable. Although neighborhood racial/ethnic con-

text was a robust predictor of arrest, these results point

to nuanced influences of BWC activation in minority

communities. This could be due to differential causes of

arrest in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

KEYWORDS

arrest, body-worn cameras, disparity, neighborhood, police,

race/ethnicity, use of force

Policing scholars have theorized about the causes of differential policing across minority com-

munities for decades (Black, 1976; Herbert, 1997;Kane,2002; Wilson, 1978). Although various

explanations have been examined—including officer-level bias (either implicit or explicit), police

deployment patterns, differential engagement in crime, and/or structural racism (Lum, 2021;

Warren et al., 2006)—little consensus about the causes of these disparities has been reached.

The evidence regarding effective strategies to remedy these inequities is similarly inconclusive

(Lum et al., 2016). One of the most commonly discussed contributors to disparities is individ-

ual police officers’ use of discretion (Brown, 1988). Although central to the police role, officer

decision making has traditionally been difficult to oversee and evaluate (Goldstein, 1960;Walker,

1993). Recent technology, however, has made it easier to see what an individual officer does dur-

ing a specific civilian encounter. One of the most highly promoted technologies in recent years is

police-worn body-worn cameras (BWCs).

The number of studies examining the impact of BWCs on police behavior in the United

States has increased dramatically. More than 70 BWC studies were included in a 2019 system-

atic review (Lum et al., 2019) compared to 21 articles in a review conducted just two years earlier

(Maskaly et al., 2017). These studies often begin with a reminder that the widespread adoption

of BWCs in police agencies across the United States exploded after the death of Michael Brown

in police custody in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. The almost immediate public demand for offi-

cers to wear BWCs in response to these types of incidents suggests that BWC adoption is moti-

vated, at least in part, by a desire to reduce racial disparities in police behavior. In response to this

outcry, former President Obama convened the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

The task force report, written by leading police executives and scholars, defined several avenues

for improving police effectiveness and public trust in the police. The deployment of BWCs was

a key recommendation (Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing,

2015), which was supplemented with substantial federal funding for agencies to purchase and

HUFF 673

implement BWCs (over $80 million through the BJA BWC Training and Technical Assistance

Program, https://www.bwctta.com/about-us).

The underlying message behind the federal recommendation and financial support for BWCs

is that this technology will increase police accountability and transparency, thereby improving

police behaviors by providing enhanced oversight of police use of discretion. Given traditional

challenges with internal supervision in policing, the ability for BWC footage to document police

officer behaviors and provide additional opportunities to evaluate police performance could cul-

minate in more legalistic policing by enhancing officers’ self-awareness (Ariel et al., 2015). This

benefit is often tied to improving police outcomes in minority communities and during interac-

tions with minority civilians by reducing the influence of extralegalfactors on police decision mak-

ing. Although this argument is widely invoked, almost no research has assessed whether police

BWCs have resulted in moreequitable outcomes across racial/ethnic groups (see, for exceptions,

Huff et al., 2021; Hughes et al., 2020).

Given continued attention to the role of technology in policing more generally and the poten-

tial for technology to reduce racial/ethnic disparities in police–civilian encounters specifically,it is

important to understand whether BWCs change police behaviors in minority communities. This

study seeks to address this gap in the literature by examining the factors that influence police

use of discretion in almost 1 million police–civilian contacts prior to and following the adop-

tion of BWCs as part of a randomized controlled trial in Phoenix, Arizona. I specifically assess

whether the deployment of BWCs changed the factors associated with arrests and use of force

and whether BWCs exert differential influences on the outcomesof police–civilian encounters in

minority neighborhoods when they are used.

1 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

To assess the impact of any program or policy, it is imperative to consider why we would expect

a particular response to influence police behavior. Numerous theoretical perspectives have been

proposed to explain the application of social control in minority neighborhoods, often including

both legal and extralegal explanations for variation in police behavior across space (i.e., differ-

ential offending and differential enforcement). The introduction of BWCs is anticipated to influ-

ence police behavior by improving the transparency and accountability of police officer actions

both internally within police organizations and externally to the community the officer serves,

thereby enhancing legalistic policing. As such, anticipated effects associated with BWCsare often

explained using deterrence-related perspectives operating at the individual officer level, which

could reduce the influence of extralegal factors, such as neighborhood racial/ethnic composition,

on officers’ use of discretion in similar incidents that occur in different places. This section reviews

relevant theories to better understand why police behavior variesacross neighborhoods and how

BWCs might alter officer behavior and minimize that variation.

1.1 Variation in police behavior across neighborhoods

Beginning with seminal work by Donald Black, social control has been considered a quantitative

variable that is used differentially to maintain order. He argues that the police will use higher

levels of law to resolve incidents involving minority civilians and those that occur in minority

neighborhoods (Black, 1976, 1980). This is often presented as a response to racial threat, whereby