Abstract

Policing in the United States has been in a state of perpetual crisis for much of the current decade, largely owing to high-profile police use-of-force events, typically against Black men in racialized communities. This has generated mass calls for substantive changes to policing, with a number of resultant reforms taking hold. One such reform is the wide-spread adoption of police body-worn cameras (BWCs). While the dialogue around BWCs largely centers on their (mixed) effect on outcomes of interest, they hold tremendous promise as a data source. BWCs offer researchers the opportunity to analyze events directly as they unfold. The emergent Video Data Analysis (VDA) methodology provides a framework for the rich description and measurement of officer, suspect, and bystander behaviors as recorded on BWCs. Findings of such research can provide important information on the situational aspects of police-citizen encounters, and for related police reform efforts. We contextualize this argument by presenting findings from our VDA of use of force events recorded on BWCs in Newark, NJ.