2020.07.13 Public Safety Commission Packet

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that officers' (and departmental) behaviors matter more than the cameras themselves. In 2018, NPF designed a study, titled "Do Body Cameras Affect the Quality of Victim - Police Interactions in Field Interviews", to determine whether different protocols for how police officers approach victims while wearing body cameras affect the reactions of victims to encounters with the police.v NPF compared a condition in which (1) officers simply recorded interviews with victims and witnesses; (2) against a condition in which officers were instructed to announce to citizens that they were being recorded and would cease recording if requested to do so by the citizen; and (3) a condition in which officers did not wear body cameras. NPF did not find differences between any of these conditions in victim ratings of the interaction. The field test assumed that people would notice and react to police body cameras. That assumption proved to be largely wrong. Only a small minority of victims surveyed believed that the officer they spoke with was wearing a body camera, and the percentage that did notice was consistent across treatments. That is, victims in both body camera conditions were no more likely than victims in the no camera control condition to report that the officer they spoke with was wearing a body camera. Per the observers, in 98% of the interactions where officers wore cameras, victims did not visibly react to being recorded, even when being told that they were being filmed. No victim objected to being recorded in the 321 incidents that researchers observed. The finding that a large majority of victims was unaware of being recorded confirms a similar finding from the Urban Institute study. Further, the survey data analysis determined that, even when victims were aware of officers wearing body cameras, there was no change in how they rated their interactions with the officer. Thus, the major finding in the study is that most victims do not notice body cameras and when they do notice, they do not object to being recorded, Moreover, those victims who did believe that the officer wore a camera did not rate the encounter higher than victims who did not believe or were not sure that the officer had a camera. The findings support a body camera policy which does not require that victims give consent to having body cameras turned on. NPF's results are largely consistent with both the PERF (2017) and the Urban Institute (McClure, et al. 2017) studies. Police Body Cameras: What Have We Learned Over Ten Years of Deployment? 1 9 National Police Foundation In 2018, NPF designed a study, titled "Do Body Cameras Affect the Quality of Victim - Police Interactions in Field Interviews", to determine whether different protocols for how police officers approach victims while wearing body cameras affect the reactions of victims to encounters with the police.v NPF compared a condition in which (1) officers simply recorded interviews with victims and witnesses; (2) against a condition in which officers were instructed to announce to citizens that they were being recorded and would cease recording if requested to do so by the citizen; and (3) a condition in which officers did not wear body cameras. NPF did not find differences between any of these conditions in victim ratings of the interaction. The field test assumed that people would notice and react to police body cameras. That assumption proved to be largely wrong. Only a small minority of victims surveyed believed that the officer they spoke with was wearing a body camera, and the percentage that did notice was consistent across treatments. That is, victims in both body camera conditions were no more likely than victims in the no camera control condition to report that the officer they spoke with was wearing a body camera. Per the observers, in 98% of the interactions where officers wore cameras, victims did not visibly react to being recorded, even when being told that they were being filmed. No victim objected to being recorded in the 321 incidents that researchers observed. The finding that a large majority of victims was unaware of being recorded confirms a similar finding from the Urban Institute study. Further, the survey data analysis determined that, even when victims were aware of officers wearing body cameras, there was no change in how they rated their interactions with the officer. Thus, the major finding in the study is that most victims do not notice body cameras and when they do notice, they do not object to being recorded, Moreover, those victims who did believe that the officer wore a camera did not rate the encounter higher than victims who did not believe or were not sure that the officer had a camera. The findings support a body camera policy which does not require that victims give consent to having body cameras turned on. NPF's results are largely consistent with both the PERF (2017) and the Urban Institute (McClure, et al. 2017) studies. Police Body Cameras: What Have We Learned Over Ten Years of Deployment? 1 9