Pre-deployment police officer perceptions of body-worn cameras in Brazil

ABSTRACT

Body-worn cameras (BWCs) have gained prominence as relevant instruments in policing activities globally. Despite their increasing prevalence, limited analyses exist in Brazil concerning the use of BWCs in public safety. This study examines the pre-BWC deployment perceptions of military police officers in Brasília (Brazil) employing logistic regression models and exploratory factor analysis. Understanding variation in acceptance among different groups is crucial in guiding an organisation's implementation of BWCs. In general, Brazilian military police officers were resistant to cameras. As expected, the results revealed that police resistance to BWCs is associated with an expectation of greater control over their activities. Notably, younger officers, as well as those serving in operational units, emerged as the leading group resisting BWCs. Conversely, perceptions of usefulness, internal procedural justice, and social recognition exhibited a significant and positive impact on fostering acceptance. These aspects suggest a potential avenue for transformative change with substantive implications for adherence to internal protocols within police agencies. The perception that BWCs are useful, make police work easier, and more valuable plays a crucial role in driving their acceptance within the Brazilian context. Finally, this study underscores the policy implications stemming from individual attitudinal shifts toward BWC acceptance across diverse social groups and within police agencies.

KEYWORDS:

• Body-worn cameras (BWCs)
• police culture
• police attitudes
• Brazil

View correction statement:

Correction

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2024.2340857)

Notes

1 Brasília serves as the federal capital of Brazil and is situated within the Federal District, which constitutes one of the 27 federative units of the country. Brasília and the Federal District are often used interchangeably in everyday usage, with Brasília being the more commonly recognised term. I will likewise use Brasília to refer to the Federal District throughout this article.

2 The Brazilian police system will be detailed in the following sections; however, the Military Police mainly oversees uniformed patrol and crime prevention activities.

3 The Military Police agencies are subjected to collective mobilisation in the event of a war, and because of this, they share data and intelligence information with the Armed Forces. They are prohibited from forming unions and engaging in strikes.

4 The labels were ‘1 = strongly disagree’, ‘2 = disagree’, ‘3 = indifferent’, ‘4 = agree’ and ‘5 = strongly agree’.

5 The extraction and rotation methods were the same for all other scales. Therefore, only the primary model fit statistics are reported.

6 These models are not shown but are available upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by FAPDF under Grant Number 00193-00002147/2022-00.