“Police bodycams—when they’re turned on—even the playing field by introducing objective evidence into the investigation of complaints about police behavior,” says Volkan Topalli, professor at Georgia State University.

“This technology now helps eliminate ambiguities and conflicting accounts among Black and Hispanic complainants more often than whites, narrowing proven disparities among racial lines.”

For the study, published as a National Bureau of Economics Research working paper, Topalli and colleagues studied citizen complaint data from the Chicago Police Department (PD) and Civilian Office of Police Accountability filed between 2012 and 2020.

Chicago PD, the second largest municipal law enforcement agency in the US, staggered bodycam deployment among its 22 police districts over the period. The authors examined this deployment to determine whether evidence from bodycam technology altered the outcomes of misconduct complaints and whether it led to different outcomes based on the race of the complainants.

Read the full article about bodycam videos by Jennifer Rainey Marquez at Futurity.