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Body-worn cameras have, since their rapid emergence from 2014 onward, long been touted as an important part of police reform efforts, given their hypothesised effects. The two most prominent mechanisms through which they reduce police force are the ‘civilizing effect’, whereby citizens self-monitor their behaviour when they are aware of being recorded, and the ‘deterrence effect’, whereby law enforcement officers are deterred from misusing coercion when there are more agency policies in place that remove their discretion in camera activation. Using a national sample of local (municipal and county) law enforcement agencies in the United States that have adopted and deployed body-worn cameras, we examine whether a policy requiring officers to inform the public of recording (a measure of the ‘civilizing effect’) and an index of policies requiring officers to activate their cameras for specific events (a measure of the ‘deterrence spectrum’) significantly reduce fatal police use of force, which we measure through a comprehensive dataset linking four major open-source fatal force datasets. Our multilevel Poisson model indicates that neither hypothesised mechanism significantly affects an agency’s fatal police use of force numbers. Given these findings, it is unlikely that these two predominate explanations behind BWC efficacy are actually impacting the fatal force-reducing capabilities of body-worn cameras. We therefore discuss further implications and additional considerations for agencies to reduce their fatal police force.

The ‘civilizing effect’ and ‘deterrence spectrum’ revisited: results of a national study of body-worn cameras on fatal police force