Making the material routine: a sociomaterial study of the relationship between police body worn cameras (BWCs) and organisational routines

Body-worn cameras ‘on the move’: exploring the contextual, technical and ethical challenges in policing practice

“…The issue of mobility is crucial when deploying BWCs (Bud 2016, Guzik et al 2019, as they mediate interactions between the police and the public in different spaces (Dymond and Hickman 2018), while acting in coordination with the police officer's body and its movement. We will now illustrate how BWCs can move both intentionally and unintentionally.…”

“…BWCs 'on the move' through cities and the countryside Urban and rural settings present different challenges for policing (Yarwood 2010, Johnstone 2016, Mawby 2016, Souhami 2019) and the technologies used by the police officers must fit their operational needs in different contexts (Coudert et al 2015, Guzik et al 2019, Taylor and Lee 2019. For instance, while police officers based in cities tend to deal with busier and bigger events involving more people and a higher volume of incidents; rural settings imply interacting with smaller communities in more remote areas.…”

“…Having at least one camera for each pair of officers seems to be the common practice, as footage will allow them to extend their capacity to see such situations and remember exactly what happened. As stated by Guzik et al (2019): 'the police are able to task to this technology actions that in the past would have been completed by human hands (and eyes)' (p. 12). Sergeant Felicity (18 years of service) illustrated how human actions can be delegated to these technological devices when patrolling such areas:…”

“…In relation to cloud services, some police forces already have partnerships with companies and their platforms (such as Microsoft Azure). This enables them to outsource the storage of the footage collected by BWCs, in order to attempt to deal with some of the information management challenges (Jarvis 2017, Guzik et al 2019. However, there are concerns with 'the long-term commercial risks of buying evidence storage and management as a service without complete clarity over future financial terms' (CoPaCC 2017, p. 35).…”

“…By focusing at a qualitative level, it brings a necessary and under researched perspective 3 to a topic saturated with randomised controlled trial based experimental studies (Ariel et al 2015, Drover and Ariel 2015, Owens and Finn 2018, White et al 2018, Demir 2019. We provide a richer analysis of the lived experience of frontline officers, similarly to work developed by Guzik et al (2019), Koen et al (2019) and Rowe et al (2018). We contribute to these discussions by offering empirical evidence on the implementation of BWCs and insights into how these technologies are perceived and used by officers in day-to-day policing.…”