BODY-WORN CAMERAS AND ORGANIZATIONAL STRESS IN CANADIAN POLICING: A QUALITATIVE STUDY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Body-worn camera (BWC) technology has gained traction in North American police services as a tool to enhance police transparency and accountability. To date, the research available on BWCs has focused on the impact BWCs have on police services, investigations, officer and citizen behaviour, and, police officers’ and community members’ attitudes towards BWCs (Lum et al., 2019). The vast majority of this existing research has been quantitative in nature and has been conducted in the United States, where police practices and policies differ from those in Canada. While there have been a number of pilot projects and research evaluations conducted on BWCs in Canada, there is still a great deal we do not know. Absent from much of the literature on BWCs is the impact the technology has on officers’ organizational stress and well-being. This is surprising considering that policing is identified as one of the most stressful occupations (Noblet et al., 2009). The present study seeks to address this gap in knowledge by conducting a qualitative analysis of a mid-size Canadian police service’s adoption and implementation of a BWC one-year pilot project. Through interviews with fifteen patrol officers, I examine how patrol officers’ ‘technological frames’ (Orlikowski and Gash, 1994) shape how officers have come to make sense of and use BWCs in their everyday practices. I argue that officers make sense of and use BWCs in line with traditional frontline policing technological frames. While most officers perceive positive outcomes of the technology for evidence and investigative purposes, they also perceive the technology to diminish their autonomy and negatively impact the ‘craft’ of policing. Further, drawing on organizational justice theory, with specific attention to the theoretical constructs of distributive justice, procedural justice and interactional justice, I explore how officers’ perceptions of BWCs may impact their overall stress and well-being. Specifically, I argue that BWCs can create stress for officers when they perceive BWCs as a form of injustice through the outcomes of BWCs (distributive justice), the protocols governing BWCs (procedural justice) and how they, as officers, are being treated by their service (interactional justice).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".