̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - evidence

̽��ֱ��conservationist helping us to make better decisions

cg605 — Fri, 04 Jun 2021 10:26:31 +0000

Bill Sutherland has started a revolution in conservation. Put simply he’d “like us to stop doing the things that we know don't work and do more of the things that do” – and with global collaborators is building the tools to help people achieve this.

Use of body-worn cameras sees complaints against police ‘virtually vanish’, study finds

fpjl2 — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 05:05:57 +0000

Body-worn cameras are fast becoming standard kit for frontline law enforcers, trumpeted by senior officers and even the US President as a technological ‘fix’ for what some see as a crisis of police legitimacy. Evidence of effectiveness has, however, been limited in its scope.

Now, new results from one of the largest randomised-controlled experiments in the history of criminal justice research, led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology, show that the use by officers of body-worn cameras is associated with a startling 93% reduction in citizen complaints against police.

Researchers say this may be down to wearable cameras modifying behaviour through an ‘observer effect’: the awareness that encounters are recorded improves both suspect demeanour and police procedural compliance. Essentially, the “digital witness” of the camera encourages cooler heads to prevail.

̽��ֱ��experiment took place across seven sites during 2014 and early 2015, including police from areas such as the UK Midlands and the Californian coast, and encompassing 1,429,868 officer hours across 4,264 shifts in jurisdictions that cover a total population of two million citizens. ̽��ֱ��findings are published today in the journal Criminal Justice and Behaviour.

̽��ֱ��researchers write that, if levels of complaints offer at least some guide to standards of police conduct – and misconduct – these findings suggest that use of body-worn cameras are a “profound sea change in modern policing”.

“Cooling down potentially volatile police-public interactions to the point where official grievances against the police have virtually vanished may well lead to the conclusion that the use of body-worn cameras represents a turning point in policing,” said Cambridge criminologist and lead author Dr Barak Ariel.

“There can be no doubt that body-worn cameras increase the transparency of frontline policing. Anything that has been recorded can be subsequently reviewed, scrutinised and submitted as evidence.”

“Individual officers become more accountable, and modify their behaviour accordingly, while the more disingenuous complaints from the public fall by the wayside once footage is likely to reveal them as frivolous.

“ ̽��ֱ��cameras create an equilibrium between the account of the officer and the account of the suspect about the same event – increasing accountability on both sides.”

However, Ariel cautions that one innovation, no matter how positive, is unlikely to provide a panacea for a deeply rooted issue such as police legitimacy.

Complaints against police are costly: both financially and in terms of public trust, say researchers. In the US, complaints can be hugely expense – not least through multimillion-dollar lawsuits. In the UK last year, the IPCC reported a continuous rise in complaints across the majority of forces.

Ariel worked with colleagues from RAND Europe and six different police forces: West Midlands, Cambridgeshire, West Yorkshire, the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and Rialto and Ventura in California, to conduct the vast experiment.

Each trial was managed by a local point of contact, either an officer or civilian staff member – all graduates of the Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Police Executive Programme.

Every week for a year, the researchers randomly assigned each officer shift as either with cameras (treatment) or without (control), with all officers experiencing both conditions.

Across all seven trial sites during the 12 months preceding the study, a total of 1,539 complaints were lodged against police, amounting to 1.2 complaints per officer. By the end of the experiment, complaints had dropped to 113 for the year across all sites – just 0.08 complaints per officer – marking a total reduction of 93%.

Surprisingly, the difference between the treatment and control groups once the experiment began was not statistically significant; nor was the variations between the different sites.

Yet the before/after difference caused by the overall experimental conditions across all forces was enormous. While only around half the officers were wearing cameras at any one time, complaints against police right across all shifts in all participating forces almost disappeared.

Researchers say this may be an example of “contagious accountability”: with large scale behavioural change – in officers but also perhaps in the public – seeping into almost all interactions, even during camera-less control shifts, once the experiment had introduced camera protocols to participating forces.

“It may be that, by repeated exposure to the surveillance of the cameras, officers changed their reactive behaviour on the streets – changes that proved more effective and so stuck,” said co-author Dr Alex Sutherland of RAND Europe.

“With a complaints reduction of nearly 100% across the board, we find it difficult to consider alternatives to be honest,” he said.

Critically, researchers say these behaviour changes rely on cameras recording entire encounters, and officers issuing an early warning that the camera is on – reminding all parties that the ‘digital witness’ is in play right from the start, and triggering the observer effect.

In fact, results from the same experiment, published earlier this year, suggest that police use-of-force and assaults on officers actually increase if a camera is switched on in the middle of an interaction, as this can be taken as an escalation of the situation by both officer and suspect.

“ ̽��ֱ��jolt of issuing a verbal reminder of filming at the start of an encounter nudges everyone to think about their actions more consciously. This might mean that officers begin encounters with more awareness of rules of conduct, and members of the public are less inclined to respond aggressively,” explained Ariel.

“We suspect that this is the ‘treatment’ that body-worn cameras provide, and the mechanism behind the dramatic reduction in complaints against police we have observed in our research.”

Drs Barak Ariel and Alex Sutherland will be giving a public talk on this research and the future of policing at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas on Monday 17 October. Book a free place here: http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/body-worn-cameras-safety-or-...

Year-long study of almost 2,000 officers across UK and US forces shows introduction of wearable cameras led to a 93% drop in complaints made against police by the public – suggesting the cameras result in behavioural changes that ‘cool down’ potentially volatile encounters.

There can be no doubt that body-worn cameras increase the transparency of frontline policing. Anything that has been recorded can be subsequently reviewed, scrutinised and submitted as evidence

Barak Ariel

Body-worn video - ̽��ֱ��independent witness

Image from a body-worn camera

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Given in evidence

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Nov 2015 08:20:33 +0000

There is concern among some policymakers that the UK is not as good as it might be at turning its world-class research into thriving industries and businesses. In recent years, the UK government has been looking for new and more reliable ways to ensure valuable innovations can cross the so-called ‘valley of death’ – the point at which they often fail to translate into a technology that can be scaled up and commercialised. However, for government initiatives to be effective, the people who design them (and invest taxpayers’ money in funding them) and the people who put them into practice need to have a better understanding both of the technologies themselves and of the industries within which they are deployed.

Which is where Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing’s Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (CSTI) comes in.

Before coming to the IfM, its founder and director, Dr Eoin O’Sullivan, was part of the team that set up Science Foundation Ireland. Encounters with research councils and government agencies informed his view that much of the R&D and innovation policy research coming out of universities was ineffective in informing the strategies and programmes of innovation agencies because it was not getting to the right level of detail with regard to technologies and manufacturing systems.

He contends: “For some innovation policy challenges you need to open up the ‘black box’, particularly when you are looking at the specific needs of a new research field or emerging technology. If you don’t do that, the people who are making policy and investment decisions about which technologies, manufacturing processes and sectors to support are doing it in the dark.”

O’Sullivan joined the IfM in 2007, working initially on its Emerging Industries programme. He was also on part-time secondment to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), giving him the opportunity to further explore its evidence needs first hand and to make sure that relevant findings from Emerging Industries were communicated to the right people in BIS, Innovate UK (then TSB) and the research councils. Then, in 2012, with funding from the Gatsby Foundation, he was able to establish the CSTI – a new research centre dedicated to doing the kinds of research which would provide policy practitioners with evidence that could offer firm foundations for their decision-making.

At first glance, the IfM may not seem to be the obvious home for an innovation policy research unit. They tend to be found in business schools or economics faculties. But the CSTI is embedded within a research environment which is actively engaged in understanding the whole spectrum of manufacturing activity, from cutting edge work in nano- and ultra-precision manufacturing processes and production technologies, through product design, technology and innovation management to global supply chains and developing new service-oriented and sustainable business models. This means that policy research here is surrounded by – and highly attuned to – the real manufacturability, scale-up, operational and management challenges that emerging science and technologies face.

But it is not just absorption by osmosis, useful though that is. CSTI offers policy research support to a number of IfM research programmes, including the ‘Bit-by-Bit’ project, which is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Economic and Social Research Council, and is looking at the interconnected technological, commercial and policy issues around the emergence of 3D printing. It is also collaborating with a new IfM research group, Fluids in Advanced Manufacturing, through the ‘Pathways to Manufacturing’ project, which, again, is concerned with the risks and challenges associated with manufacturing a new technology at a commercial scale.

Forging connections with researchers beyond the IfM is also important. O’Sullivan believes that to understand fully the economic aspects of emerging technologies, engineers, economists and management researchers need to pool their expertise: no one discipline is capable of making significant progress on its own. ̽��ֱ��Babbage Industrial Network is a CSTI-hosted initiative designed to share ideas and develop a common language across these different specialisms.

As well as making connections across the research community – and contributing to their research findings and recommendations – it is vital for the CSTI team to have close working relationships with government and agency officials in order to understand their evidence needs and, where possible, co-design research projects to address them.

To this end, there is a steady two-way flow of traffic between CSTI and government departments. Research Associate Dr Charles Featherston, for example, has spent time embedded within the manufacturing policy team at BIS, looking at how different policy levers can be used to nurture emerging manufacturing technologies. Paul McCaffrey, based in the Government Office of Science and project manager for the Government’s recent Foresight project on the future of manufacturing, came to the IfM to reflect on what had been learnt from running the Foresight exercise and to integrate those findings with CSTI’s analysis of how such things are done in other countries. Belinda Clarke, now the Director of AgriTech East, spent time at CSTI in 2014, while she was the lead technologist for Synthetic Biology at Innovate UK, building an evidence base for her calls for funding.

CSTI is also directly involved in developing and delivering services that IfM Education and Consultancy Services (IfM ECS) provides to national and regional governments around the world, helping them understand the global industrial landscape, their place within in it and the opportunities and challenges they face. This includes work IfM ECS is currently doing on behalf of BIS and Innovate UK, looking at high value manufacturing in the UK in order to prioritise investment in key areas of potential growth.

CSTI’s research addresses a range of difficult questions. What kinds of infrastructure, for example, does an emerging technology need as it ‘pushes’ out of the science base? As a country adopts more proactive industrial sector strategies, what are the particular competitiveness challenges faced by each sector for which there may be innovation, technology or R&D solutions? Standards and regulations are also important: knowing the ‘rules of the game’ and the very direct effect they have on the context for emerging technologies and industries.

̽��ֱ��–industry knowledge exchange is another of CSTI’s core research themes. ̽��ֱ��distinctive CSTI approach is also evident here: getting into the details of the technology to unpick why it is that programmes work for some categories of technology and for certain types of maturity in certain sectors, and not in others. Research Associate Tomas Coates Ulrichsen recently ran a US–UK workshop on long-term strategic partnerships with participants from Berkeley, MIT and Georgia Tech as well as GSK, Boeing and Rolls-Royce. O’Sullivan explained: “By involving the right people and really drilling down into the detail, we uncovered some interesting implications for universities and funding bodies, arising from the fact that big companies are increasingly choosing to work with just a handful of world-class universities.”

Turning science into technologies and then into economic wealth is an international race. To have any chance of competing, policymakers need to understand what makes some countries faster and better at it than others. This has become a key focus of CSTI activity and the team has developed a robust framework for undertaking country comparisons. It recently contributed to the Hauser report on the UK’s Catapult network, looking at how similar bodies work in other countries and what lessons might be learnt for the UK. ̽��ֱ��team is currently working on a study commissioned by the EPSRC on how different countries are investing in quantum technologies.

In addition to these comparative studies, Research Associate, Dr Carlos López-Gómez, has established a series of International Policy Forums, at which academics and policymakers come together to understand how policy institutions and processes work in different countries. Three have been held so far, focusing on Japan, Singapore and Germany. Carlos is about to go on secondment jointly with the ̽��ֱ�� of Tokyo and the Centre for Research and Development Strategy, part of the Japanese Science and Technology Agency. He will be looking at the role of government-funded bodies – akin to Catapults – which support the translation of science into commercially successful technologies.

CSTI has also been centrally involved in setting up a more policy–practice series of international workshops, convened by IfM, at which senior UK government, agency and industrial representatives build closer links with their counterparts in key countries and share their experiences and best practice. So far, workshops have been held in Japan, India and the USA (at the White House). Another is planned for Berlin early next year, looking particularly at foresight exercises and emerging technology strategy development, with participation from the BIS Innovation Directorate and the Government Office for Science.

Ultimately, all these countries are facing similar challenges: how do they develop effective policies for manufacturing, for key technologies and sectors and how do they join all of that into a coherent industrial strategy? Getting this right, clearly, has enormous implications for national prosperity. By working with scientists, engineers, management researchers and economists and by not being afraid to open up that ‘black box’, the CSTI team at Cambridge is doing something new and distinctive. O’Sullivan said: “We like to think we are providing a certain type of research-based but practical evidence which is of real value to policymakers and programme planners and which no-one else is really geared up to give them.”

This article was originally published in ̽��ֱ��IfM Review

How do we get better at taking the research knowledge from our science and engineering base and turning it into technologies, industries and economic wealth? ̽��ֱ��Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy aims to give policymakers the information they need to provide effective support for emerging technologies and industries.

For some innovation policy challenges you need to open up the ‘black box’, particularly when you are looking at the specific needs of a new research field or emerging technology. If you don’t do that, the people who are making policy and investment decisions about which technologies, manufacturing processes and sectors to support are doing it in the dark.

Eoin O'Sullivan

Reilly Butler

121.365 Innovation

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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