From [HERE] San Francisco’s police department is the latest embattled law enforcement agency to pledge to equip its officers with body cameras in response to charges of widespread police brutality against racial minorities. The city is joining an international chorus of advocates who are convinced that body cameras will reduce violent incidents between police and community members. But a mammoth new study shows that cameras can have precisely the opposite effect.

The study, which was led by Barak Ariel of Cambridge University, integrated the findings of 10 experiments in which police in different cities were randomly assigned to use a body camera during different shifts. Remarkably, the study captured the behavior of over 2,000 police officers and more than two million hours of law enforcement activity. The dismal result: Body cameras had no overall effect on how often police used force and was correlated with a statistically significant increase in assaults on police officers. Although violence between suspects and police went down in a few of the 10 study sites, these benefits were more than cancelled out by other sites where cameras made no difference or made violence more common. [MORE]