No abstract

The national debate about police use of force against racial minority residents has led to increased attention to body-worn cameras (BWCs) as tools for increasing police accountability. Although researchers have documented the effectiveness of BWCs, little research has been done to examine why police departments decide to use them in the first place. Based on an innovation framework, the current study aims to explain what factors determine police departments’ decisions to implement BWCs. By examining 139 U.S. police departments using event history analyses, I find that the police departments with a higher severity of police-involved deaths of minority residents and a higher strength of social movements protesting police brutality are more likely to implement BWCs. In addition, some organizational and environmental factors, including the availability of federal grants and the council-manager form of government, have significant associations with BWC implementation. Findings also suggest that different patterns of BWC implementation are demonstrated according to environmental context.

Based on representative bureaucracy theory, the current study investigates whether increasing Black representation in police forces is negatively associated with racial discrimination in law enforcement. This study additionally investigates how associations may differ according to the organizational or environmental contexts of the forces. Results show that an increased share of Black officers is associated with decreased police-involved deaths of Black residents, but is not significantly associated with a change in order maintenance arrests of Black suspects. In addition, the negative association between Black representation and police-involved deaths of Black residents disappears when the percent of Black officers surpasses about 15 percent, especially in organizations where White officers comprise a larger share. These findings support the potential negative role of organizational socialization on the effectiveness of increasing the share of Black officers in policing, implying that additional long-term efforts to change organizational culture are needed to realize the benefits of enhancing Black representation.

No abstract

Controlling police officers’ discretionary behavior during public encounters has been an important issue in U.S. policing, especially following several high-profile police-involved deaths of racial minorities. In response, body-worn cameras (BWCs) were introduced to enhance police accountability by providing police managers an opportunity to monitor police–public encounters. Although many U.S. local police departments have now implemented BWC programs, evidence of program effects on daily police behavior has been limited. This study therefore focuses on whether officers’ arrest behavior changes when they perceive that BWCs are recording their interactions with the public. By conducting a difference-in-differences analysis using 142 police departments, I found that BWCs have negative and small treatment effects on arrest rates and null effects on the racial disparity between numbers of Black and White arrests. These findings imply that officers may become slightly more cautious in the use of arrests after wearing BWCs, but BWCs do not change their overall disparate treatment of Black versus White suspects. The results further indicate that the effects of BWCs on arrests are prominent in municipalities with high crime rates or a high proportion of non-White residents, which suggests that BWC programs demonstrate different effects according to the characteristics of communities served.