The knowledge they could be videotaped is changing the way police officers conduct themselves on the job — but that’s not always a good thing, according to a survey by an Ottawa police veteran.
Greg Brown is a local officer and a doctoral candidate who studied police consciousness of citizen-recorded video and social media.
His findings have led him to worry that police officers may put themselves or the public in danger by engaging in “risk-averse policing” to avoid negative attention on the Internet.
Nearly three-quarters of the 231 veteran front-line Ottawa and Toronto police officers surveyed reported behavioural changes as a result of being aware that they were or could have been recorded on video by a private citizen. Roughly half the respondents said they use less physical force, and less often, than they would if it wasn’t so likely that they’d be captured on video.
The study, published this month by Oxford University Press in the British Journal of Criminology Advance Access, came partly as a result of the author’s return to patrol work after 16 years in a desk job with Ottawa police.
“One of the first few shifts when I went out on the road with the officers, I was struck by this new atmosphere of policing,” said Brown. “The public now is much more engaged in policing. There’s much more criticism of police tactics.”
Brown, 50, is a doctoral candidate at Carleton University who conducted the first empirical study on how the public’s use of smartphones and YouTube to document police incidents has affected officers, at a time when high-profile police controversies are resonating across North America.
The study found that 95 per cent of officers surveyed reported that they were aware they had been recorded on video by a private citizen while engaged in police work — on an average of 17 known occasions during their careers — and that that awareness is top of mind while conducting police work.
“Police are not oblivious to these developments,” said Brown. “There’s quite a strong disciplining influence that’s present in officers’ consciousness when they go out to do their work.”
Brown said that’s a good thing if it means police feel more accountable than ever before and as a result are less likely to use excessive force, but he said it’s a negative sign if they’re engaging in “risk-averse policing,” or a police phenomenon known as FIDO: “forget it, drive on.” He also worries that police officers’ mindfulness of cameras may also hinder their ability to do their work safely.
“Is this going to get an officer or somebody hurt because they’re hesitating?”
Brown has now undertaken a similar study that will expand the findings across Canada and into the United States. He said 14 major police agencies in Canada and five in New York have already signed up for the study, which he expects to complete in 2018.
