A recent spate of high-profile police cases that have provoked public disquiet about how the police handle public interactions have been partly to blame for an overall loss of public trust in law enforcement. Police are rightly coming under increased scrutiny for their approach to, and handling of, their interactions with the citizenry. Procedural Justice Theory suggests when members of the public feel they have been treated with dignity and respect, they are more likely to comply with lawful orders. However, even small perceptions of unfairness can cause the model to break down.

In partnership with the West Midlands Police force, Livvi Taylor and Sian Reid, both PhD students at Lancaster University, are examining police-public interactions using hundreds of hours of raw footage from police body-worn cameras. By utilising this new digital technology captured by law enforcement, they aim to assess real-life interactions within the police and gather results representative of current relations employing this rich data source.

Within policing populations, evaluating behaviour during police-citizen interactions has been reliant on interview and survey-based measures with participants which, by their very nature, are subject to false or incomplete recollections. Previous uses of digital technologies within psychology, have been showcased, such as the use of CCTV cameras to evaluate bystander behaviour in real life contexts. The growth in the use of body-worn cameras by the police, has now provided the opportunity to study real life police-citizen interactions in situ.

Livvi Taylor explained, “For the first time, we are able to utilise such a rich source of data to evaluate how individual police interactions with the public occur in real life and in real time”.

The current and future research being carried out with this technology will increase our knowledge about police behaviour, which could be used to identify potential policy or training changes that could reverse the present decline in public trust.