UNM researcher tries to find out when bodycams are effective

Body cameras are being used by police across the country. Sometimes the cameras make police departments better and sometimes they don’t. A University of New Mexico researcher is trying to find out why.

The three-year research project is being funded by the National Science Foundation and conducted in partnership with Purdue University.

The goal is to figure out which factors shape a police officer’s perspective of body cameras and find out how officers respond to those factors.

“At the end of this project, we’re hoping to have a very robust dataset that we can really dig into, and hopefully provide police agencies with our findings to inform best practices in the use of these technologies,” UNM assistant professor of management Daniel Ravid said.

Ravid, one of the project’s principal investigators, is an organizational psychologist and studies the psychology of a workplace — specifically, surveillance and performance monitoring of work and organizational processes.

The study involves 60 police agencies in 25 states, including in some metropolitan cities in the Southwest. Ravid declined to specify which agencies are included in the dataset.

The Bureau of Justice found that in 2016, 47% of U.S. law enforcement agencies had acquired body cameras and 80% of large police departments had done so. That number is likely even higher now, Ravid said.

“It’s such a prevalent technology, we should really understand the effects of them on individuals,” Ravid said. “Also, when you look at research on body-worn cameras, what you see is really mixed effects — meaning some studies might find cameras lead to decreases in use of force and officers really support the use of body-worn cameras and feel protected by them. But another study might find that the officers are feeling burned out because of them and feeling stressed because of them, and there’s very little effects on police behaviors at all.”

Which means there’s an opportunity to do nuanced research on why in one case a body camera is very effective — and in another it is not.

The researchers are looking at organizational, environmental and individual factors that affect an officer’s perspective of body-worn cameras.

“One kind of individual difference between officers might be their relationship with their supervisor and their relationship with their organization, and an officer’s perception of their organizational support, and if they have a great relationship with their supervisor that might have huge impact on how they understand this monitoring — if they feel like it’s there to support them, versus trying to catch them doing wrong,” Ravid said.

From an organizational side, the researchers might consider department policies, such as if the camera starts automatically or starts with a tap. From an environmental perspective, they’re considering broader factors such as the socioeconomic demographics of a community.

“Then from a broader contextual standpoint, we’re looking at a community member-police agency relationship,” Ravid said. “Is there a combative relationship between community members and their local police officers? Or is it more of a partnership towards solving local problems?”

Researchers already have surveyed officers from 60 police agencies involved in the study. The agencies range in size from small rural departments with 10 officers to large metropolitan agencies with 1,200 . They’ve also started interviewing police captains and police chiefs.

Ravid has been encouraged and a little surprised that most officers seem to support body-worn cameras.

“When you think about monitoring more broadly, you might have the thought that being monitored at work is a bad thing or would be oppressive,” Ravid said. “But body-worn cameras are one instance where a lot of officers feel that there’s an accountability standpoint. Most officers are fine and happy to be held accountable, and also feel safe and that community members will be held accountable in those same interactions.”

Researchers in the process of surveying community members those agencies serve to understand the relationship with their police departments and are collecting publicly available data, such as census and crime data.

After George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed a law that required law enforcement in New Mexico to wear body cameras to strengthen accountability and as a deterrent against unlawful use of force.

The Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department began using body-worn cameras in 2021, after the state requirement went into effect.

The department signed a $3.8 million contract for the cameras with Utility Inc., along with other technology such as Wi-Fi hot spots and cameras in vehicles. Last year, the sheriff’s department got out of its contract three years early — only on the hook for about $2 million of the original contract — because the technology wasn’t adequate for the department’s needs. The department entered a new $4 million contract with Axon Enterprise Inc., which included other technology such as tasers and license plate readers.

The Albuquerque Police Department started testing out mini cameras in 2010. That year the department spent roughly $100,000 to purchase 600 mini-cameras and a computer server, according to previous Journal coverage.

Belt worn audio recorders had been used by APD since the 1980s, according to APD spokesman Gilbert Gallegos, and became required across the state in the ‘90s. By 2014, the department was using Scorpion cameras, which were inadequate, Gallegos said, but switched to Axon Enterprise Inc. in 2016.

A lot of the push for bodycams has been focused on transparency, but many of the uses go beyond that, Ravid said.

“One agency we talked to said when they first implemented body-worn cameras, one of the first things they saw in the footage was a bunch of different handcuffing techniques were being used, and handcuffing is one of the quickest ways to de-escalate a situation,” Ravid said.

So the department emphasized handcuffing techniques in training and within three months, saw a significant improvement, he said.

While bodycams might be a high-stakes example of workplace monitoring, the trend is prevalent throughout other industries, from warehouse work for Amazon to remote desk jobs with browser monitoring.

“One of the broader goals of this project beyond the specific insights that will be applied to police organizations and body-worn cameras would be to better understand the broad psychological factors that influence how people perceive work monitoring,” Ravid said.

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