Adoption of body cameras by United States police agencies: an organisational analysis

ABSTRACT

In the wake of recent high-profile lethal force incidents in the United States, police agencies have felt pressure to mandate that officers wear cameras to video record encounters with citizens. In this article, we examine how organisational characteristics influence the adoption of body-worn camera (BWC) technology in American police agencies. Using data from the 2013 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Survey (LEMAS), we conduct logistic regression analysis to examine how various organisational variables influence whether agencies use BWCs. We analyse responses from 823 agencies. Our results suggest that departments that utilise more technology are more likely to adopt further innovations, such as BWCs. Conversely, we find that agencies with large operating budgets and agencies represented by collective bargaining units are less likely to report utilising BWCs. Agencies with more bargaining power have more leverage to resist pressures to use technology which might limit police discretion.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovation
• body-worn cameras
• police organisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 While these data predate some of the high-profile lethal force incidents, they still allow us to look at organisational predictors of BWC adoption. We encourage researchers to continue examine research questions similar to ours in the wake of Ferguson and other recent events.

2 It is likely that other variables, such as measures of the local environment, also predict use of body-worn cameras. In order to retain our emphasis on organisational factors, we did not explore this possibility in this study. We encourage future researchers to examine the effects of these variables on the decision to use BWCs.

3 Because many of our variables are closely related, multi-collinearity may bias our findings. As a precaution, we ran variance inflation scores for our independent variables. This analysis did not yield any scores above 2.028. Thus, collinearity does not appear to be problematic for our analysis.