An analysis of more than 20 years of media coverage is offering new insight on how the adoption of body worn cameras by police officers and law enforcement agencies has been shaped more by narrative than by evidence. 

In Police Body-Worn Cameras: Media and the New Discourse of Police Reform, Criminology professor Dr. Erick Laming and co-author, Christopher Schneider (Brandon University), present the first large-scale research review of how media narratives have framed body-worn cameras as tools to improve police accountability and transparency, which have influenced camera adoption in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. 

“Body-worn cameras have sat at the centre of police reform narratives, especially around accountability and transparency,” said Professor Laming. “Those ideas are powerful, but they are also very difficult, if not impossible, to measure empirically. It is such a challenge to evaluate whether a camera produces accountability or transparency, and yet those ideas have driven widespread adoption.” 

The team examined more than 20,000 pages of material published between 2000 and 2023 in The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Toronto Star, the leading publications in their regions. Through a qualitative media analysis, Prof. Laming traced how language, claims, and expectations around cameras evolved over time in the media based on interviews with police officers, camera stakeholders, and advocates. 

Before 2005, accountability and transparency were already central to police reform discussions, but cameras were largely absent. Between 2006 and 2013, pilot programs and isolated cases—particularly in the U.K.—introduced body cameras into public debate. Following 2013, amid high-profile incidents of police violence, cameras became widely promoted as solutions, even though the authors found no consistent way to measure whether they actually improved accountability. 

“Police didn’t know what to make of cameras at first,” Prof. Laming said. “Now that they have adopted the cameras, they understand they have control of the tool and the footage. There aren’t many cases in which footage from police body-worn cameras has been used against police.” 

The book argues that body-worn camera footage is often treated as the official account of events, even when bystander video exists. The research suggests that independent, neutral bystander recordings remain one of the strongest mechanisms for public accountability. 

The authors call for greater public skepticism and stronger civilian oversight. In Canada, independent, civilian-led oversight bodies offer a model for reviewing footage outside police control. Without that neutrality, the book concludes, technology alone cannot deliver the reform it has long been promised to provide. 

Learn more about Criminology at Trent University.