Social media affordances in the context of police transparency: An analysis of the first public archive of police body camera videos

ABSTRACT

As more police departments adopt body cameras (BCs), there is a hope that the devices will help usher in a new era of police accountability. Turning to the first online archive of BC footage, this article examines the emergent possibilities and problems that arise when human actors interact with technical designs in applied contexts. Communication affordance theory is used as a framework to situate the archive within discussions about police use of social media, visibility, transparency, and police–community relations. A web application using YouTube’s public API was used to analyze the usage and interaction statistics of the archive. Then, a focus group was conducted to discuss the usability of the archive and its benefits and drawbacks for police–community relations. Findings show that despite the visibility of social media, the videos have low view counts, little interaction, are not easily searchable, and raise more questions about police–community relations than they answer.

KEYWORDS:

• Affordances
• visibility
• body cameras
• social media
• transparency

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Nicholas Earwood for his assistance in writing the web application used to retrieve the YouTube data. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and thoughtful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.