Ferguson protests prompt calls for cops to wear on-body cameras

On-body cameras mean police use less force, and a range of new apps are giving citizens new ways to hold errant police officers to account

© WTVR

Who watches the watchmen? Since the riots started in Ferguson, Missouri, many have decried the police shooting of teenager Michael Brown and brutal crowd-control tactics at the protests following his death (see "

Crowd-control policing in the US is stuck in riot mode

"). The uproar has turned into a call for better surveillance of the police. How might that be done?

The US Department of Justice has the power to investigate and overhaul problematic police departments. Ferguson has not yet been investigated, but it's a likely candidate.

"Police misconduct is not usually just caused by one rotten apple. It is caused by a rotten barrel," says Stephen Rushin at the University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign. "A lot of people would argue that you're seeing that in Ferguson."

For the US public, an investigation would not be enough. A

petition to the White House

has called for a "Mike Brown Law", requiring all police to wear an on-body camera while on duty. It garnered more than 100,000 signatures, which obliges the White House to respond to the request.

On-body cameras

automatically record an officer's interactions from a first-person perspective. Quite a few US cities are using them, including Salt Lake City in Utah, and Oakland in California. Last year,

Barak Ariel at the University of Cambridge

conducted the

first major study of on-body cameras, with police

in Rialto, California. He found that officers were 60 per cent less likely to use force when wearing them. Citizen complaints, too, fell sharply. Ariel's group is now monitoring the cameras' impact in two dozen police departments around the world.

But he does not think the US is ready for a national roll-out. "I'm really concerned that we're going to change the law before we have a little bit more time to look at the evidence."

One concern is that some interactions might work better off-camera. The cost of equipping all US police officers would be a big issue, too. And how should police store the many terabytes of video they collect - and when could they safely dump it? One police force Ariel is monitoring in Israel plans to retain everything they record indefinitely. In the UK, most departments that use on-body cameras are free to delete uncontested videos after 30 days.

In places without such cameras, citizens are taking matters into their own hands. Last week, a

family group of three Georgia teenagers

released a smartphone app called Five-O, in which users rate local policemen from A to F, along with details of their interactions. They say it could be used to identify abusive officers and support calls for departmental reviews.

OpenWatch, a firm based in California, has produced an app called Cop Recorder that let users covertly record and upload their experiences. And the American Civil Liberties Union in New Jersey has an app called Police Tape. It is unclear if any apps have led to notable victories for citizens: the ACLU could not provide any such examples for Police Tape, which was released more than two years ago. But it's still early days for such approaches.

There's no reason that surveillance should be all one-way, says Rushin. "Most law professors can't think of a good reason why we shouldn't allow citizens to tape police officers."