Article by Ingrid Wickelgren: But unless something tragic happens, body camera footage generally goes unseen. “We spend so much money collecting and storing this data, but it’s almost never used for anything,” says Benjamin Graham, a political scientist at the University of Southern California.
Graham is among a small number of scientists who are reimagining this footage as data rather than just evidence. Their work leverages advances in natural language processing, which relies on artificial intelligence, to automate the analysis of video transcripts of citizen-police interactions. The findings have enabled police departments to spot policing problems, find ways to fix them and determine whether the fixes improve behavior.
Only a small number of police agencies have opened their databases to researchers so far. But if this footage were analyzed routinely, it would be a “real game changer,” says Jennifer Eberhardt, a Stanford University psychologist, who pioneered this line of research. “We can see beat-by-beat, moment-by-moment how an interaction unfolds.”
In papers published over the past seven years, Eberhardt and her colleagues have examined body camera footage to reveal how police speak to white and Black people differently and what type of talk is likely to either gain a person’s trust or portend an undesirable outcome, such as handcuffing or arrest. The findings have refined and enhanced police training. In a study published in PNAS Nexus in September, the researchers showed that the new training changed officers’ behavior…(More)”.