Abstract
Body-worn cameras (BWCs) continue to be adopted by law enforcement agencies around the world, yet how camera monitoring affects performance dimensions of policing in “critical incident” situations has received scant attention. We contribute to filling this gap. Guided by distraction-conflict theory from psychology, we conducted a laboratory experiment and used electrophysiological methods (EEG and ECG) to explore whether officer performance during simulated critical incidents is impaired by camera-induced attentional conflict. Results from a convenience sample of police officers from a medium-sized, Midwestern police department in the USA reveal that camera monitoring had complex, often deleterious, effects on cognitive load, stress arousal, and performance. The current investigation supports a small but growing body of research revealing that BWCs, like any new technology, not only have intended positive consequences, but also potential unintended negative ones that need to be considered from a safety standpoint. A more thorough discussion of policing in the age of BWCs and other forms of camera surveillance is overdue.
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Notes
In the USA, confidence in the police fell to a historic low in 2020, with only 48% of Americans reporting that they have a “great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence in the police (Brenan, 2020).
The dataset generated from the current study is not publicly available due to a privacy agreement with the cooperating police department from which participants were recruited.
We had originally planned to include a “diverse group of private citizens” on the supposed panel as well; however, we decided not to do so due to concerns about how it would impact our ability to recruit officers to take part in the study. As such, our study may be viewed as a more conservative test of the impact of attentional conflict from camera monitoring on the hypothesized outcomes. We return to this issue in the “Discussion” section.
EEG is a relatively noninvasive, direct measure of neural activity in the brain on a temporally sensitive (millisecond-level) scale. A non-technical EEG primer for social scientists is available in the supplement material of Kalkhoff et al. (2020), available here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0190272519868988/suppl_file/Supplemental_Material.pdf.
The 1-s penalty for missed shots is used in a pistol performance drill called the “LE Bill Drill” that was developed by Joseph Sidoti for the Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy.
P-values for all pairwise comparisons herein are two-tailed.
There is also a significant interaction between camera order and scenario type. However, because this interaction does not involve any of the main effects of interest, we omit discussion of it due to space limitations.
In hindsight, the lack of significance for the PRR50 measure could be due to the fact that it does not discriminate as well between groups as PRR measures at lower thresholds, such as PRR20 (Mietus et al. 2002).
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy (OPOTA) and to Robert McCue and Dr. Joy VerPlanck at MILO for generous help with the research. We are also grateful to Erika Daniels, Ashleah McDonald, and Nicole Perrone for assistance with data collection.
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This research was supported by an internal grant from the Research and Sponsored Programs office at Kent State University.
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Kalkhoff, W., Pollock, J., Pfeiffer, M. et al. The Effects of Camera Monitoring on Police Officer Performance in Critical Incident Situations: a MILO Range Simulator Study. J Police Crim Psych 37, 619–636 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-022-09519-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-022-09519-5