Body-worn cameras could police the police, but still it’s the officer pressing ‘record’

As a new tool, body-worn cameras can help in building accountability and trust in a police force that has lost the confidence of the public, but the question remains: who governs its use?

Dr Jean-Pierre Roux is a South African criminologist. His doctoral research, conducted jointly at the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, examined the adoption of body-worn cameras by police in England and Wales, addressing governance, organisational change, police transparency and accountability, officer protection and the interpretation of body-worn video.

Police wield extraordinary power over citizens. In a democracy, this rests on a critical deal: we grant police special powers, a monopoly on lawful violence and the tools to exercise them. In return, they protect us. But every deal comes with conditions. The conditions are simple: safeguards against abuse and accountability when those safeguards fail. Every new tool the police procure revisits the deal and ultimately reduces to the same fundamental question: who governs its use?

Body-worn cameras (BWCs) are South African policing’s latest tool, and they have reignited an old contest over police power. Internationally, the technology has been justified on shifting grounds, first to gather digital evidence, then to deter violence and more recently to deliver transparency and accountability. This time, we are told, the tool is different. BWCs will expose misconduct, build accountability and restore trust at a time when the public’s trust in police is in crisis.

Unfortunately, none of these proposed benefits lives inside the tool alone. The problem is both structural and simple: police are central to the very system that is meant to hold them accountable.

It is the deeper story getting lost in the political winds. Institutional power and culture have kept an iron grip on South African policing. In theory, the balance stands. Give the police the systems they need, and pair them with countervailing oversight: a system that watches “the watchers” as much as “the watched”. In practice, however, the balance collapses because policing culture treats oversight as a threat to be managed rather than a duty to be met. And the BWC system is unusually easy to manage because police control every part of how it operates. The camera may be a critical gaze, but a gaze you control is not a gaze upon you.

As it stands, police select, procure, own and configure BWC systems. Officers decide when to press record, and their movements determine what the lens captures and misses, shaping what is produced before ever needing an edit. Officers then decide what is relevant by selecting and clipping what is reviewed. Management decides what is kept, for how long, and who has access to it. At no point in this production and management process does an outsider’s hand touch the controls. And where police have both control and discretion, no camera can overrule them.

Body-worn camera systems enable greater police transparency and accountability only when other conditions are met.