A recent study from Cambridge University found that complaints levelled against police officers across UK and US decreased by 93% since body cameras were implemented in the workforce. What’s more, researchers also learned that it fell regardless of whether or not a camera was being worn at the time because of contagious accountability; a phenomena related to doing the right thing regardless of there being any evidence.

Co-author Dr Alex Sutherland of RAND Europe says, “It may be that, by repeated exposure to the surveillance of the cameras, officers changed their reactive behaviour on the streets. ” he suggests that those exposed to the camera equipment adjusted their reactive behaviour on the street and the effects stuck even when a body camera wasn’t being worn.

The information was collected over the course of a year from 1,847 officer across seven police departments who logged 1. 4 million hours between 2014 and 2015. The officers were randomly assigned a shift with or without a camera so that the researchers could create a ‘control’ and ‘treatment’ setting and accurately assess if body cameras held any benefits.

It was found that the number of complaints filed against police dropped from 1,539 to only 113 instances by the time research ended. In many cases, the video evidence led to suspects pleading guilty and the officers refraining from excessive force to handle high tension situations.

Cambridge criminologist and lead author Dr Barak Ariel concluded that the cost to benefit ratio of wearing body cameras was 4:1 because for every dollar spent on the technology police would save roughly US$4 on complaints litigation. He added that the ratio will increase as body camera equipment gets cheaper.

2016-10-7 03:00