Peer Reviewed Article

A Randomized Controlled Trial Evaluating the Effects of Police Body-Worn Cameras

Authors
  • Alexander Coppock
  • Anita Ravishankar
  • David Yokum
Published
November 2, 2017
Publication
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Discipline
Areas of Study
Geographic Areas
Document Control Number(s)
  • ISPS 17-028
Citation

Yokum, David, Anita Ravishankar, and Alexander Coppock (2019). A Randomized Control Trial Evaluating the Effects of Police Body-Worn Cameras. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201814773. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1814773116.

Abstract

Police body-worn cameras (BWCs) have been widely promoted as a technological mechanism to improve policing and the perceived legitimacy of police and legal institutions, yet evidence of their effectiveness is limited. To estimate the effects of BWCs, we conducted a randomized controlled trial involving 2,224 Metropolitan Police Department officers in Washington, DC. Here we show that BWCs have very small and statistically insignificant effects on police use of force and civilian complaints, as well as other policing activities and judicial outcomes. These results suggest we should recalibrate our expectations of BWCs’ ability to induce large-scale behavioral changes in policing, particularly in contexts similar to Washington, DC.

Description

Supplemental:

Link to article Full original article ; Link to working paper here (titled, “Evaluating the Effects of Police Body-Worn Cameras: A Randomized Controlled Trial”)

Related Data:

Data deposition: The cleaned dataset sufficient for reproducing the difference-in-means estimates of the treatment effects have been deposited in the Open Science Framework https://osf.io/p6vuh/