Police Body Cameras Appear to Moderate Interactions with Civilians
警用身体相机缓解警民关系
A study of seven jurisdictions found that when cops wear body cameras, complaints against them by civilians fall precipitously.
对七个管辖区的研究发现，当警察戴上身体照相机时，平民对他们的投诉数量急剧减少。
撰文/播音：埃丽卡·贝拉斯（Erica Beras）
翻译：杨枭
审校：丁可含
The last few years have seen numerous widely publicized incidents of civilians, black men in particular, being killed by police. In response, many officers are now required to wear body cameras. The theory is that technology will lessen the likelihood of an officer using unnecessary force to diffuse a situation. Now research finds that body cameras do indeed appear to keep encounters between police and civilians from intensifying to the point where a civilian files a complaint–in a few jurisdictions, anyway.
最近几年，发生了许多广为人知的警察击杀平民（尤其是黑人男子）事件。有鉴于此，许多警官现在被要求佩戴身体相机。这样做的原理在于，这项科技可以帮助减少警官使用不必要武力而使情况恶化的可能性。现研究发现，身体相机确实能在警察与平民起冲突时减少一些投诉——至少在一些辖区是这样的。
The study is in the journal Criminal Justice and Behavior. [Barak Ariel et al., “Contagious Accountability”: A Global Multisite Randomized Controlled Trial on the Effect of Police Body-Worn Cameras on Citizens’ Complaints Against the Police]
这项研究发表在期刊《刑事司法与行为》（ Criminal Justice and Behavior）上。
Researchers collected data from seven police departments in the U.K. and the U.S. that serve a total population of two million people. The data represented over 1.4 million hours logged by nearly 2,000 police officers in 2014 and 2015.
研究人员收集了来自英国和美国的七个警察部门的数据，辖区覆盖总人数约两百万。在2014年和2015年，近2000名警察登记的数据超过140万小时。
Officers were randomly assigned to either wear or not wear body cameras week by week. When the police wore the cameras they were required to have them on at all times.
官员被随机分配为每周一次佩戴或不戴身体照相机。当警察戴着照相机时，他们需要随时将其戴在身上。
The year before the study, a total of 1,539 complaints were filed against officers at the seven sites. But during the course of the body camera experiment, a total of just 113 complaints were filed—a reduction of 93 percent. Six of the seven sites saw complaint reductions of at least 88 percent.
在研究前一年，共有1,539宗投诉涉及七个地盘的警务人员。但在身体照相机实验过程中，只提出了113宗投诉，减少了93％。七个警局中有六个的投诉减少了至少88％。
An interesting finding was that complaints against officers wearing body cameras were almost equal to complaints against those who were not wearing the cameras. The study’s authors suggest that the change in police behavior from wearing the camera continued even after the camera was removed. This effect is called “contagious accountability”: all officers became more conscious of their actions—camera or no camera.
一个有趣的发现是，使用身体照相机的警察的投诉数量几乎等于对没有佩戴照相机的人的。该研究作者指出，即使在相机被移除后，佩戴相机的警察行为变化仍在继续。这种效应被称为“传染性责任”：所有军官都变得对自己的行动更有意识——无论有没有相机。
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