Unequal Treatment Under the Law? Consequences of Body-worn Cameras on the Court System

By Katie Bollman

  In less than a decade, body-worn cameras rose from rarity to standard amongst local law enforcement in the U.S. as agencies sought to enhance trust, transparency, and accountability of officers. However, this policing tool also generates large quantities of a new source of data for criminal courts: footage of criminal defendants. This data can provide evidence pertinent to a criminal case, but at a cost of attorney time. Using rich case data from Virginia state courts from 2006-2020 and a new body-worn camera data set I investigate whether local law enforcement adoption of body-worn cameras changes court filings, criminal case dispositions, time to disposition, and other case outcomes. I find evidence that body-worn cameras affect interactions between police and members of the public, but that these effects are restricted to a small subset of cases. Once cases enter the courts, I find that in the aggregate, contrary to expectations, both case processes and resolutions are unresponsive to the influx of data generated by body-worn camera footage.

Working Paper, Michigan State University, 2021. 54p.