Police Body Research Articles

Social media affordances in the context of police transparency: An analysis of the first public archive of police body camera videos

ABSTRACTAs more police departments adopt body cameras (BCs), there is a hope that the devices will help usher in a new era of police accountability. Turning to the first online archive of BC footage, this article examines the emergent possibilities and problems that arise when human actors interact with technical designs in applied contexts. Communication affordance theory is used as a framework to situate the archive within discussions about police use of social media, visibility, transparency, and police–community relations. A web application using YouTube’s public API was used to analyze the usage and interaction statistics of the archive. Then, a focus group was conducted to discuss the usability of the archive and its benefits and drawbacks for police–community relations. Findings show that despite the visibility of social media, the videos have low view counts, little interaction, are not easily searchable, and raise more questions about police–community relations than they answer.

Performance of police personal protective equipment challenged with a military grenade

Police body armour in the United Kingdom (UK) is designed to provide protection from edged weapons and low-velocity pistol ammunition. Recent events have raised concern about whether UK police body armour and associated personal protective equipment (PPE) provides protection from military threats such as improvised explosive devices (IED) and grenades. In this paper PPE worn by specialised police officers was assessed for its protective performance from a specified grenade threat. The major cause of injury suffered by police officers challenged by a modern military grenade would be from the associated fragmentation which perforated coveralls, boots, helmet and soft body armour, but not hard armour plates.

Police Surveillance Machines: A Short History

Our experiences with surveillance machine adoption have led to many foreseeable consequences that hold lessons about surveillance technology markets, private power, and police reform. However, these questions of private power, police agencies as consumers, surveillance platforms, and limited public access and input are not limited to this experience. Many new police technologies will arise in the same way. If we are to effectively use technologies to bring about a more just law enforcement system, we must design police systems of procurement and use in a manner that emphasizes democratic, not private, control. Our experience with police body cameras provides us with a cautionary tale.

E-Policing Lalu Lintas yang Terintegrasi Secara Nasional

Abstract This paper discusses a creative breakthrough of Polantas in service to the community by using technology and information in an application that can be accessed through android integrated and connected to all areas of Indonesia. The purpose of this paper is to generate public confidence in Polantas and increase cooperation Polantas and the community in an on-line policing concept (e-Policing). This application is not a new entity in the traffic police body, by leveraging existing, measurable and developmental uses of IT, as it is in the Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) concept, creating a fast, precise, accurate, accountable, informative and accessible. Keywords: E-Policing, integrated, public trust.

A preliminary study into injuries due to non-perforating ballistic impacts into soft body armour over the spine

The UK Home Office test method for ballistic protective police body armours considers anterior torso impacts to be the worst-case scenario and tests rear armour panels to the same standards as front panels. The aim of this paper was to examine the injuries from spinal behind armour blunt trauma (BABT) impacts. This study used a cadaveric 65 kg, female pig barrel and 9 mm Luger ammunition (9 × 19 mm, FMJ Nammo Lapur Oy) into HG1/A + KR1 soft armour panels over the spine. Injuries were inspected and sections removed for x-radiography and micro-CT assessment.All shots over the spine resulted in deep soft tissue injuries from pencilling of the armour and the shirt worn under the armour. The wounds had embedded fabric debris which would require surgery to remove resulting in increased recovery time over injuries usually seen in anterior torso BABT impacts, which are typically haematoma and fractured ribs. The shot with the deepest soft tissue wound (41 mm) also resulted in a fractured spinous process. Shots were also fired at the posterior and anterior rib area of the pig barrel, for comparison to the spine. Similar wounds were seen on the shots to the posterior rib area while shallower, smaller wounds were seen on the anterior and one anterior rib shot resulted in a single, un-displaced rib fracture. The anatomical differences between pigs and humans would most likely mean that injury to a human from these impacts would be more serious.

Policing Women’s Bodies: Pregnancy, Embodiment, and Gender Relations in Canadian Police Work

Despite the influx of women in policing, women continue to face barriers to their full inclusion. In this article, we put women’s bodies at the center of our analysis by theorizing how pregnancy shapes the gendered interactions and experiences of women police at work. Through in-depth, qualitative interviews with 52 Canadian officers, we find that pregnancy frames women’s bodies “out of order” for “police work” and positions women even further from the ideal police body, which is ostensibly male. In response, women engage in myriad strategies to reassert their value as officers, strategies that require women to do additional labor.

Augmenting justice: Google glass, body cameras, and the politics of wearable technology

PurposeThis paper aims to uncover the assumptions and concerns driving public debates about Google Glass and police body cameras. In doing so, it shows how debates about wearable cameras reflect broader cultural tensions surrounding race and privilege.Design/methodology/approachThe paper employs a form of critical discourse analysis to discover patterns in journalistic coverage of these two technologies.FindingsPublic response to Glass has been overwhelmingly negative, while response to body cameras has been positive. Analysis indicates that this contrasting response reflects a consistent public concern about the dynamics of power and privilege in the digital economy. While this concern is well-founded, news coverage indicates that technologists, policy makers and citizens each hold assumptions about the inevitability and unvarnished beneficence of technology.Research limitations/implicationsSince this qualitative approach seeks to discern broad emergent patterns, it does not employ a quantifiable and reproducible coding schema.Practical implicationsThe article concludes by arguing that grassroots action, appropriate regulatory policy and revitalized systems of professional journalism are indispensable as the struggle for social justice unfolds in the emerging digital economy.Social implicationsThese debates represent a struggle over what and how people see. Yet public discourse often glosses over the disadvantages of technological change, which impacts who is able to amass social power.Originality/valueThis comparative approach yields unique conceptual insight into debates about technologies that augment ways of seeing.

Language from police body camera footage shows racial disparities in officer respect

Using footage from body-worn cameras, we analyze the respectfulness of police officer language toward white and black community members during routine traffic stops. We develop computational linguistic methods that extract levels of respect automatically from transcripts, informed by a thin-slicing study of participant ratings of officer utterances. We find that officers speak with consistently less respect toward black versus white community members, even after controlling for the race of the officer, the severity of the infraction, the location of the stop, and the outcome of the stop. Such disparities in common, everyday interactions between police and the communities they serve have important implications for procedural justice and the building of police-community trust.

Police body cameras and us: Public perceptions of the justification of the police use of force in the body camera era.

Police body cameras and us: Public perceptions of the justification of the police use of force in the body camera era.

Police Body Cameras in Large Police Departments

Body Worn Cameras are spreading worldwide, under the assumption that police performance, conduct, accountability, and legitimacy, in the eyes of the public, are enhanced as a result of using these devices. In addition, suspects’ demeanor during police–public engagements is hypothesized to change as a result of the video-recording of the encounter. For both parties—officers and suspects—the theoretical mechanism that underpins these behavioral changes is deterrence theory, self-awareness theory, or both. Yet evidence on the efficacy of Body Worn Cameras remains largely anecdotal, with only one rigorous study, from a small force in Rialto, California, validating the hypotheses. How Body Worn Cameras affect police–public interactions in large police departments remains unknown, as does their effect on other outcomes, such as arrests. With one Denver police district serving as the treatment area and five other districts within a large metropolitan area serving as comparisons, we offer mixed findings as in the Rialto Experiment, not least in terms of effect magnitudes. Adjusted odds-ratios suggest a significant 35% lower odds for citizens’ complaints against the police use of force, but 14% greater odds for a complaint against misconduct, when Body Worn Cameras are used. No discernable effect was detected on the odds of use of force at the aggregate, compared to control conditions (OR=0.928; p>0.1). Finally, arrest rates dropped significantly, with the odds of an arrest when Body Worn Cameras not present is 18% higher than the odds under treatment conditions. The outcomes are contextualized within the framework of reactive emergency calls for service rather than proactive policing. We further discuss officers’ decisions and the degree of the necessity of arrest in policing more broadly, because the burden of proof for tangible evidence necessary for making a legal arrest can be challenged with the evidence produced by Body Worn Cameras: officers become “cautious” about arresting suspects when Body Worn Cameras are present. Limitations associated with the lack of randomly assigned comparison units are discussed, as well, with practical recommendations for future research on Body Worn Cameras.

Police Body Cameras and Professional Responsibility: Public Records and Private Evidence

Abstract:Extensive media coverage has focused attention on the disproportionate frequency and severity of police use of force against black communities in the United States. Video documentation captured by public officials and private citizens aided by the ubiquity of cell phones has made this violence inescapable, enabling conversations of system-wide problems within a mainstream context. Video documentation has been posed as a means of increasing transparency on the part of police and the district attorneys tasked with the decision of whether or not a police shooting requires the indictment of an officer. This documentation is also simultaneously posed as a check against the unmitigated authority of officer testimony, as a financial windfall for companies selling the technology, and as the ultimate exoneration for police officers attempting to justify their decisions in the field. These concurrent rhetorical registers operate in different domains and rarely overlap. The enormous amount of attention that has been focused on body-camera programs belies a techno-utopian impulse, an investment in a technological fix to complex and interlocking historical and socio-political realities. With this attention, funding has followed, pre-existing body-camera programs have been extended, and pilot programs have launched, presenting new challenges for police departments whose resources cannot meet the fiscal demands of a dramatic technological shift in a short period of time. Similarly, policies and laws regarding these devices themselves as well as the footage they capture have been sluggish to coalesce around coherent principles. This paper examines the emergent markets, policies, and laws governing the footage captured by police-worn body cameras in the United States and employs this footage as a way to reckon with complex ethical issues for information professionals.

The Mirage of Use Restrictions

The Fourth Amendment strikes a balance between Americans’ privacy interests and the government’s need to investigate crime. It does so almost exclusively by placing restrictions on how the government collects information: if the government surveillance constitutes a “search,” the government must meet certain legal standards before it can engage in that surveillance. Over the past few decades, technological advances have increased exponentially the government’s ability to collect information, and many of these new surveillance methods do not fit into the traditional definitions of a Fourth Amendment search. In response, courts and commentators have searched for new doctrines to define and limit the government’s surveillance power. One of the more popular proposals that has been advanced is to force the government to adopt “use restrictions” — limitations on what the government can do with information that it collects or that is already in its possession. This new type of restriction represents a significant shift from the current paradigm of regulating government surveillance: a shift away from regulating how information is collected and towards regulating how the information is used. Use restrictions on surveillance data have been termed the “future of surveillance law.” They have been proposed in many different contexts, such as restricting how the government can process massive amounts of public data; limiting the use of information from DNA databases; regulating the information obtained through special needs searches; restricting the use of information that law enforcement obtains after conducting a search of a computer; or limiting the use of data from drones or police body cameras. This Article will review the many possible applications of use restrictions and discuss five potential doctrinal bases to justify them: (1) apply an “ongoing seizure” doctrine; (2) create a purpose test for the exclusionary rule; (3) re-define a “search” as including the processing of information, not just its collection; (4) make the purpose of the data collection a factor in determining whether collecting the data is a search; and (5) limit which government agencies are allowed access to the data that is collected. The Article concludes that these doctrinal bases are generally insufficient to justify imposing use restrictions. The Article argues that adopting use restrictions would be bad policy, since adopting type of restrictions would discourage the creation of tighter collection restrictions, give the government possession of vast amounts of our private data, and in some cases unduly hinder legitimate law enforcement functions. Therefore, the Article opposes the movement towards use restrictions and proposes that courts and legislatures maintain the focus of Fourth Amendment law on collection restrictions and move forward with use restrictions only in very limited circumstances.

La Policía Nacional Civil de El Salvador (1990-1997)

Detalla el génesis de la Policía Nacional Civil (PNC), considerando su concepción en el proceso negociador seguido por el Gobierno de El Salvador y la guerrilla del FMLN, poniendo énfasis en la influencia y el peso de la ONU en tal proceso, y los diversos problemas y resistencias para la instauración del nuevo cuerpo policial en el período 1990-1997.

Police body worn cameras: a mixed method approach assessing perceptions of efficacy

Purpose The importance of body-worn cameras (BWC) in policing cannot be overstated. This is not a hyperbolic statement – use of force incidents in Ferguson and Baltimore, the ensuing riots, coupled with critical long term implications for police community relations demonstrate the need for BWC data. Few studies have been published on the use of BWCs and little is known about officer perceptions, administrator decision making, and agency use of BWC data. No published studies incorporate qualitative data, which lends important context and depth, in the interpretation of officer survey data. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The current study presents a mixed-method study of a large university police agency prior to full implementation of BWC. A survey of patrol officers and supervisors, using a census approach with near full participation, coupled with focus group interviews, produced data on perceptions, concerns, and expectations of full BWC implementation. Findings Findings point to officer concerns regarding the utilization of BWC data and administrative expectations regarding complaint reduction and officer assessment. Originality/value Important implications regarding training and policy are presented. BWC data represent an important tool for agency decision makers but have numerous potential negative uses. Understanding officer concerns juxtaposed with administrator expectations, through both survey and qualitative data, advance the knowledge on BWC.

The puzzle of police body cams

Police body cameras are popping up everywhere, often to good effect because both police and suspects normally behave better in their presence. No wonder these small devices, enthusiastically endorsed by police, politicians, and civil-rights advocates, have generated a burgeoning industry. Yet people know very little about how and why they work, so the intended and unintended consequences of using them remain nebulous.

The Body-worn Camera as a Transitional Technology

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Debate Introduction: The Privacy and Surveillance Implications of Police Body Cameras

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Police Body Cameras: Mending Fences and How Pittsburgh is a Leading Example

After the police brutality deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray, amongst others, many call for increased accountability through police officer body-worn cameras. The following Note discusses the potential benefits of body camera use, the concerns that body cameras raise, relevant current and pending legislation in Pennsylvania, and whether police body cameras can be used to address race relations in connection with police officer brutality.

Eyes are not Cameras: The Importance of Integrating Perceptual Distortions, Misinformation, and False Memories into the Police Body Camera Debate

Eyes are not Cameras: The Importance of Integrating Perceptual Distortions, Misinformation, and False Memories into the Police Body Camera Debate

Police Body Cameras in Missouri: Good or Bad Policy? An Academic Viewpoint Seen Through the Lens of a Former Law Enforcement Official

Police Body Cameras in Missouri: Good or Bad Policy? An Academic Viewpoint Seen Through the Lens of a Former Law Enforcement Official