Orlando Police body camera study shows big change in behavior

The Scottsbluff Police Department will have a total of five body cameras.

A new study from the University of South Florida indicates that body-worn cameras on law enforcement officers are an effective tool in reducing the number of use of force incidents.

Scottsbluff Police Department expects the body cameras to be implemented by the end of this month.

In the year before they wore body cameras, the officers used force an average 3.5 times.

It’s not just the behavior of police officers that body cameras can change, it can also affect how someone who’s being stopped or interacting with police behaves.

The officers who did not wear cameras also had a drop in the use of force, from 3.5 to 2.2.

For more on this, read the article from Fox 13 titled: “USF study shows police body cameras reduce use of force”. The statistics appear to tell a different story, even though only one in four officers in the study agreed that wearing the devices had any impact on their behavior in the field. “They are both less-inclined to escalate an event”.

USF researchers said they launched the study to get a better idea of how these officers – and citizens – act when they know everyone is watching. A working group of city agencies has yet to approve a draft body camera policy proposal.

Orlando Police Chief John Mina supports this push, and he’s getting help in the form of a roughly 0,000 federal grant for the equipment.

Other studies have pointed to similar drops in use of force and civilian complaints after the implementation of body cameras.

The number of response-to-resistance incidents among officers wearing the cameras declined 53% compared to the year before the study and that the number of complaints filed against the officers dropped 65%.