Collaborative Research: Uncovering the Effects of Body-Worn Cameras on Officer and Community Outcomes

Organizations are increasingly relying on technological systems to monitor, analyze, and influence employee work behaviors. One prominent example is the adoption and deployment of body-worn cameras by law enforcement organizations. Body worn cameras are small video and audio recording devices that law enforcement officers wear when in the field and when interacting with the public. Body-worn cameras have a variety of technological features that can potentially transform officer training, accountability, and performance, and increase or decrease community trust in law enforcement. However, previous findings on the effects of body-worn cameras on individuals and organizations have varied widely. The goal of this project is to better understand how individual, organizational, environmental, and technological factors interact to influence how officers and the communities they serve respond to body-worn cameras. The project collects data from multiple sources to answer research questions about the effects of body-worn cameras. In the first phase of data collection, the project team collects survey data from patrol officers working in nearly 60 agencies that use body-worn cameras. The surveys include measures of burnout, well-being, proactivity, and attitudes regarding their organizations and body-worn cameras. The project team also conducts interviews with high-ranking officers from each of these agencies to better understand body-worn camera implementation in each agency. In the second phase of data collection, community members from each of the jurisdictions that the participating law enforcement agencies serve are surveyed regarding their attitudes about their local agency and about law enforcement technologies. Community sentiments are triangulated using by colling data from social media posts using natural language processing techniques. These multi-level multi-source data allow the project team to test a model of the effects of body-worn cameras on officers and communities and create fundamental knowledge about the ways organizations operate in modern digital contexts, building critical theoretical groundwork to inform future design and policy of body-worn camera use in law enforcement organizations. This project is jointly funded by the Science of Organizations Program (SoO) and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.