An experiment by Stanford University, carried out with 470 military police officers from Rio de Janeiro who worked in Rocinha between 2015 and 2016, shows that in seven out of ten incidents the police disobeyed the body camera protocol requiring them to record the events. The researchers monitored 8,500 service shifts of the Special Police Operations Battalion (BOPE) over a year. The study concluded that agents showed resistance to activating the cameras, even during routine care.
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Reduction
Despite widespread resistance to recording incidents, the study shows that the use of cameras led to a 46% reduction in various types of policing activities considered proactive, such as searches. Although less than a third of interactions between police and the community were recorded, researchers found that having cameras on their uniforms deterred officers from interacting with residents.
New Rules in São Paulo
The data goes against the argument of the São Paulo government in the decision to make the use of body cameras in the Military Police more flexible, by claiming that no police incident will be recorded because there are rules mandating the registration of every relevant event. The notice for hiring new equipment, published last week, exempts automatic and uninterrupted recordings of the police shift, delegating to the agent or the Operations Center (Copom) the task of activating the device.
Olho Vivo Program
The cameras attached to the PM’s uniforms began through the Olho Vivo Program, established during the João Doria government, in 2020. Since then, a series of researches have pointed to positive results both in the fall in police lethality and the protection of the police themselves.
In 2020, military police officers on duty killed 659 people, after recording 716 deaths in the previous period (2019). In 2021, the first full year with the program’s implementation in some battalions, the number fell to 423. In 2022 it reached the lowest number of deaths in recent decades: 256.
Recent Cases in Rio
Images obtained by the newspaper O Globo show three cases in which military police officers are suspected of trying to prevent their body cameras from recording incidents with signs of crime by covering the device’s lenses or removing them from their vests. These three incidents involve police officers suspected of attacking an arrested transvestite, negotiating the freedom of a prisoner, and killing an unarmed man. The use of body cameras in police uniforms was determined by the Federal Supreme Court (STF) within the scope of the so-called “ADPF das favelas”, which deals with measures to combat police lethality.
Analysis:
The experiment carried out by Stanford University with military police officers in Rio de Janeiro highlighted their resistance to using body cameras, raising questions about the effectiveness and implementation of this resource in police operations. Although the study demonstrates a significant reduction in proactive policing activities, agents’ resistance to recording essential occurrences can compromise the transparency and accountability of police actions.
It is for this reason that public security experts argue that recording should be automatic and uninterrupted, as is currently done, preventing the police officer from choosing which moment to record. The measure would prevent bad professionals from committing irregularities during working hours and could also become evidence in favor of the agent himself, in case of correct conduct.
