Investigating the influence of institutional perviousness on the adoption of body-worn cameras by United States police agencies

ABSTRACT

Abstract

There is evidence that body-worn cameras decrease rates of police use of force and improve citizens’ perceptions of police legitimacy. Yet, research examining the processes leading agencies to adopt body-worn cameras is sparse. Using the 2013 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) data from U.S. police agencies of all sizes, this study examines the relevance of institutional perviousness for body-worn camera adoption. Perviousness governs the chances that an organization adopts a new policy or practice, as well as the extent to which an organization is internally aligned to implement the new innovation. Results demonstrate that perviousness increases the odds of agency body-worn camera adoption, alongside other organizational characteristics. The findings suggest that future research should consider the potential impact of perviousness when investigating other organizational outputs.

KEYWORDS:

• Policing
• body-worn cameras
• perviousness
• organizational studies

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Drs. Greg Zimmerman, Amy Farrell, Jack McDevitt, and Glenn Pierce for their helpful feedback and guidance over the course of developing this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The 2016 body-worn camera supplement was considered for use since it provides updated counts of body-worn camera usage. However, if the 2016 supplement were used, the data would be collected at differing time points, therefore changing the interpretation of findings. Additionally, due to the sampling strategy that LEMAS uses, smaller agencies included in prior versions of LEMAS may not be included in future versions. This creates problems when merging 2013 LEMAS with the 2016 LEMAS body-worn camera supplement, and not every agency merges. Therefore, it was decided to only use 2013 LEMAS in the current analysis.

2. Items were recoded where 1 indicated yes and 0 indicated no. Some items within the scale were recoded from −8 (indicating not applicable) to 0 (indicating no) for the following items: if the agency provided jurisdiction-wide crime statistics to the public through a website, if the agency provided crime statistics by beat, district, or other area within its jurisdiction through a website, if the agency provided crime statistics by street through a website, if the agency reported locations of sex offenders through a website, if the public can report crimes through an agency’s website, if the public can ask questions to the agency through a website, and lastly if the public can file complaints through a website. The ‘not applicables’ were recoded to ‘nos’ because if the agency does not have a website then they would be considered less pervious. They are less likely to be susceptible to environmental influence because of a lack of a line of communication with the community.

3. CFI and TLI in this case fall just below the recommended > 0.95 value. However, RMSEA is within acceptable bounds (<0.06).

4. Jenness and Grattet (2005) used the number of community policing practices as an indicator of organizational alignment, while Farrell (2014) used community policing practices as an indicator of a more general openness to change. Both works had theoretical reasons to use community policing as an indicator of perviousness. The current study uses community policing as a control because community policing practices are ubiquitous within policing strategies (see Gill, Weisburd, Telep, Vitter, & Bennett, 2014). As an example, only 1% of the current sample did not use any community policing strategies.

5. It should be noted that this odds ratio does not specify that vertical differentiation had a substantive relationship with body-worn camera adoption. An odds ratio of 0.99 means that a one dollar increase in vertical differentiation (signaling a wider gap between executive and officer pay) is associated with a 1% decrease in odds of body-worn camera adoption. While the relationship is significant, vertical differentiation does not contribute much to our understanding of body-worn camera adoption.

6. We thank an anonymous reviewer for their helpful recommendation to consult this work.

7. Although, these versions are not directly comparable due to differing questions asked between them.

8. We thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing up this limitation in the data.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nathaniel Lawshe

Nathaniel Lawsheis a PhD student in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University located in Boston, MA. His research interests include police organizations, racial justice in policing, and criminal justice system reform