Hands Off: Remote Body-Worn Camera Activation and Police Use of Force

Abstract

Body-worn cameras have been widely adopted to curb police use of force, yet mixed and null findings have led some scholars to conclude that officers are simply unresponsive to monitoring, fueling a broader debate in the principal-agent and street-level bureaucracy literatures over whether police can be meaningfully managed through formal oversight or are rendered impervious to it by occupational culture and individual disposition. However, existing studies share a critical weakness: they fail to measure compliance with camera activation, leaving open whether null results reflect genuine insensitivity to surveillance or merely the discretionary non-use of the technology. This thesis fills that gap by operationalizing activation compliance through the adoption of the Signal Sidearm, an automatic-activation system that triggers recording upon weapon draw, effectively removing officer discretion and creating a natural experiment in enforced compliance. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design across police departments, I find that automatic activation reduces use-of-force rates by 36 to 44 percent while conventional cameras produce no significant effect. Departments operating automatic activation upload 52 to 95 percent more videos per encounter, confirming that the technology substantively increases compliance. Arrest rates remain unchanged, indicating restraint rather than enforcement withdrawal. These results suggest that officers do respond to credible monitoring and that policymakers should prioritize how cameras are implemented.