Body cameras for police use: politics, government and truth

Abstract

Over the past 15 years, body cameras for police use have been elevated to the status of key antidotes to various global policing pathologies: police lethality, abuse of power, lack of transparency, discretionary excesses, institutional racism, the crisis of police legitimacy, among others. Until now, mixed results from empirical research, combined with the high costs of implementing and operating body cameras, have restricted the mainstream debate to the search for causal relationships between their use and improved policing in hyperlocal contexts. In addition, the adoption of body cameras by police officers is seen in the literature as a simple consequence of civil demands for greater transparency and accountability. As a result, the literature on the subject has overshadowed a broader question that we believe is essential to address: beyond the purely ideological debate that divides supporters and opponents, what power strategies are at play today in the spread of body cameras for police use? To attempt to answer this question, we draw on the main empirical findings available in the literature on the subject. At the same time, we problematise them based on the social struggles from which they emerge and the techno-social agencies into which they are integrated. This allows us to advance the hypothesis that the police use of body cameras participates in power games that have government and truth as their object, as theorised by Michel Foucault in the late 1970s and early 1980s.