Police body cameras were supposed to reduce violence. They haven’t.

Police surveillance and body cameras captured the killing of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols by officers in Memphis, Tennessee, in stark and gruesome detail. The footage Memphis police released Friday shows officers punching, kicking, and pepper spraying Nichols, as well as striking him with a police baton. Nichols died three days after the January 7 attack.

Memphis prosecutors have now charged five officers with Nichols’ murder and other crimes, based in part off the body camera footage. But the case is a stark reminder that such cameras, now used widely in the U.S. and touted as a way to reduce officer misconduct, have a decidedly mixed track record.

Body camera footage has been used to prosecute officers in high-profile cases of excessive force — including the conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for murder and manslaughter in the killing of George Floyd. But studies split over whether the cameras actually deter police misbehavior. A meta-analysis of 70 studies in 2019 found no evidence that body cameras significantly reduced police misconduct, while a more recent 2021 study found a small but measurable drop in the use of force by officers wearing cameras.

“When body cameras were first rolled out in large numbers starting in 2016, there was a hope that they would help to advance public safety because police officers would behave better if they knew their actions were being monitored and recorded,” said Chad Marlow, senior policy council at the ACLU. “The murder of Tyre Nichols provides yet more proof that those hopeful predictions were wrong. In hindsight, body cameras have proven to have a limited and inconsistent value when it comes to holding officers accountable for their misconduct, and virtually no beneficial effect in preventing misconduct in the first place.”

The hope for body cameras

Body cameras have been used in the U.S. for more than two decades, but they got a major boost in 2014 when President Barack Obama proposed spending $75 million to help equip more police departments with them. The White House request came after a police officer shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri — a case that sparked major protests nationwide.

Obama’s proposal was in part based on the idea that wider use of body cameras would foster trust between police and the public, drawing on research from Community Oriented Policing Services and the Police Executive Research Forum “that officers and civilians both act in a more positive manner when they’re aware that a camera is present.”

But research in the following years has called the claim into question — as have numerous high-profile incidents of police killing people while wearing body cameras.

A 2017 study by the Washington, D.C., city government found that officers who wore body cameras used force at about the same rate as officers who did not. The study followed more than 2,000 Metropolitan Police Department officers for more than two years. Law enforcement agencies considering the use of body cameras “should not expect dramatic reductions in use of force or complaints, or other large-scale shifts in police behavior, solely from the deployment of this technology,” the D.C. analysis concluded.

“We would also temper expectations about (and suggest further research into) the evidentiary value of BWCs,” — body-worn cameras — wrote the study authors. “The administrative court data we had access to has certain limitations, but preliminary analyses do not uncover any clear benefits. Body-worn cameras may have great utility in specific policing scenarios, but we cannot conclude from this experiment that they can be expected to produce large, department-wide improvements in outcomes.”

In 2019, academics conducted the then-largest comprehensive review of studies on the impact of body camera use. They examined 70 analyses to look for through lines and see what overarching results could be seen in them. The analysis did not find a clear benefit from the cameras.

“BWCs have not had statistically significant or consistent effects on most measures of officer and citizen behavior or citizens’ views of police,” wrote the researchers. “Expectations and concerns surrounding BWCs among police leaders and citizens have not yet been realized by and large in the ways anticipated by each.”

A more recent study, published in 2021 by the University of Chicago Crime Lab and the Council on Criminal Justice, found that body cameras have a small positive effect, reducing the use of force by nearly 10 percent. The cameras also reduced complaints against police by 17 percent, the study found.

But those results, while encouraging, are not in line for the original lofty hopes for the cameras.

Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City, a Memphis-based civil rights organization, said one of the striking things about what he saw on the Nichol’s videos was the casual nature of the aftermath. “Tyre Nichols had been beaten to a pulp and left handcuffed up against the car,” he said, noting “just how normal this looked to people [officers] on the scene, because it was.”

In the video, officers can be seen milling around, patting each other on the back. In one section of footage they discuss how they almost sprayed each other in the eyes with pepper spray during the attacks.

“Hey, sit up, bro,” one officer appears to say later, once Nichols slumps, hand-cuffed, to the ground.

“It happens and it doesn’t matter that there’s a body camera going, there’s three body cameras going, plus the SkyCop camera with a big blue light flashing on it because they do not care – this is part of their work,” said Spickler, who previously served as a public defender for Shelby County, where Memphis is located. “They see this as part of their job. Their every day involves roughing people up, sometimes a little less than that and sometimes as much as that but the person didn’t die — the reality is they know this.”

So what next?

The reality is technology is just a tool — not a panacea for systemic structural problems in law enforcement. There is acute value in footage like this being used to show the impact of police abuse and evidence in making the case against the five officers involved in the killing, who have been fired and charged with second-degree murder, but critics say the issues go well beyond BWCs.

“Every time a new technology is introduced into law enforcement, it’s sort of touted as something that’s going to equalize things or be good in some ways for social justice and in fact, ends up further empowering a party that’s in power because that party is the one that inevitably controls that new technology and is an interested party and will use it for its own purposes,” said Sarah Lustbader, a New-York based public defender who has written extensively about issues in the criminal justice system.

Lustbader said that body cameras, shouldn’t be under the control of the people they’re meant to hold accountable. Despite policies that state the cameras must always be on, or that stored footage must not be altered or deleted, officers don’t always abide by those policies.

Still, as a public defender who has practiced before and after body cameras entered wide use, Lustbader said that, anecdotally, there is a difference between those police squads that use body cameras and those that don’t. She would love to see more studies on the cameras’ effectiveness – but such data is hard to come by when law enforcement controls it. That means studying the cameras depends on the cooperation of police.

For his part, Spickler emphasized that rather than technological solutions or policy tweaks, the country needs to rethink public safety.

“We’re not going to train our way out of this problem. We’re not going to find the correct technology solution to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” he said. “We’re not going to get the right implicit bias training to get this doesn’t happen again. Fundamentally, in America and in Memphis, Tennessee, the institution of policing is — well, I’d say broken but it actually functioned pretty well for what it is doing — it is more destructive than it is useful to our community.”

Police departments nationwide have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on body cameras but without more data and continued study they may just be a band aid on a gunshot wound when it comes to changing police behavior at scale.

“When communities have discussions about whether they want their police wearing body cameras, and what benefits they might bring, Tyre Nichols’ tragic death should be a reminder that the benefits of police body cameras have proven to be far greater in theory than in fact,” said Marlow.