The price tag of police body-worn cameras: officers’ and citizens’ perceptions about costs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research shows that both police officers and the public consistently express support for body-worn cameras (BWCs). The cost of increasing police transparency and accountability, however, is often overlooked. As many agencies have been deterred by their high price, BWCs may not always be cost-effective. Citizens have also rarely been surveyed on BWCs’ financial implications, suggesting their support may have been miscalculated. Considering the calls for reducing police budgets, it seems important to question whether BWCs are an appropriate use of public money. This article investigates how financial implications influence support for BWCs. It first explores how officers perceive the financial implications of using BWCs through interviews and focus groups. Then, it examines public support for BWCs, as revealed in experimental phone surveys. Results indicate that officers are generally sceptical about the public value of BWCs. While citizens showed a high endorsement for BWCs, their support dropped when reminded it could lead to cutbacks in social programmes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".