CRJ 1020 Module 3: sample paper, in real form

Body-Worn Cameras in a 94 Officer Municipal Police Department: Weighing Discretion, Evidence, and Cost

[Student Name]

Thomas Edison State University

CRJ-1020: Introduction to Criminal Justice

Module 3 Written Assignment

Mentor: [Mentor Name]

June 14, 2026

Patrol Work and the Discretion It Carries

Fairhaven is a composite city of 71,000 residents policed by a municipal department of 94 sworn officers and 21 civilian staff. Patrol absorbs 68 of those officers across three shifts and answers roughly 38,000 calls for service a year, about 104 a day. Most of that work does not end in an arrest. It is traffic stops, medical assists, disputes between neighbors, welfare checks, and reports taken hours after the fact. Patrol is the point where most residents meet the criminal justice system, and nationally an estimated one in five residents age 16 or older had some contact with police during 2020 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2022).

What makes patrol distinct as a component is discretion. An officer standing at a curb decides whether an encounter becomes a warning, a citation, a summons, or an arrest, and that decision is rarely reviewed unless something later goes wrong. In Fairhaven last year, patrol officers filed 61 use of force reports and the department received 44 formal complaints from residents. Twelve of those complaints turned on a disputed account of what was said or done. Because the file in each of the twelve held an officer narrative on one side and a resident statement on the other, the reviewing supervisor closed nine as not sustained.

That pattern is why the department is considering body-worn cameras, and it is also why the question reaches past policing into the courts. Discretionary decisions made at the curb set what a prosecutor sees, what a defense attorney can challenge, and what a judge weighs at a first appearance. A recording changes the evidentiary record available at every one of those later stages, not only inside the department that made it. The question in front of the city council is therefore narrower than the public debate suggests: does the value of that record justify $412,000 across five years.

The Case for Adoption

The strongest support comes from an early randomized trial in Rialto, California, where shifts were randomly assigned to camera and no camera conditions across a full year. Use of force incidents were markedly lower on camera shifts, and complaints against officers fell sharply department wide during the trial (Ariel et al., 2015). Agencies that adopted early cite this study more than any other, and the appeal is easy to see: a small department, a clean random assignment, and results pointing the direction supporters predicted. Fairhaven is close to Rialto in size, which makes the comparison feel apt to council members.

The second argument concerns the quality of evidence rather than the behavior of officers. When a complaint turns on what was said, a recording replaces two competing narratives with one record that a supervisor, a prosecutor, or a defense attorney can watch. Applied to the twelve disputed files in Fairhaven, footage would have given the reviewer something better than a credibility contest, whichever way each file then resolved. Adoption is also no longer unusual. By 2016 roughly half of general purpose law enforcement agencies in the United States had acquired cameras, so the department would be joining a settled practice (Hyland, 2018).

A third argument is internal training and accountability. Recorded stops give field training officers concrete material to review with new officers, and they let supervisors find a pattern before the pattern becomes a lawsuit. Supporters add that cameras protect officers as often as they expose them, since footage of a lawful stop can close a false complaint in an afternoon instead of after a month of investigation. Each of these claims is plausible, and supervisors in the department raised all three during planning, but a plausible claim is not the same as a demonstrated effect.

The Case Against, and What Later Trials Found

The most important counterweight is that the Rialto result has not held up at scale. A randomized trial in Washington, DC assigned cameras to more than 2,000 officers and found no statistically significant effects on use of force or on civilian complaints (Yokum et al., 2019). A systematic review pooling studies from many sites reached a similarly restrained conclusion: effects on force and complaints are inconsistent, and where complaints do fall, the reason may be a change in how complaints are filed rather than a change in what officers do (Lum et al., 2020). A council told to expect the Rialto outcome would be misled.

The second objection is cost, and here it is concrete. The cameras themselves are a minor line. Storage, redaction, and records staffing are not. The five year figure of $412,000 for 94 officers is dominated by cloud storage and by the six tenths of a records position required to review and redact footage before any public release. That money also has alternatives with their own evidence behind them. The same total would fund a full time crisis response clinician for roughly three years, an option aimed directly at a share of the 38,000 calls the department already answers.

The third objection is privacy, and residents raise it more often at hearings than they raise cost. Officers record inside homes, at overdose scenes, and during interviews with people who never chose to be filmed, and public records law then decides who may watch that footage later. A department that adopts cameras without a written retention and release rule has created a surveillance archive rather than an accountability tool. Federal research summaries make the same point, holding that written policy rather than hardware decides whether the technology delivers anything at all (National Institute of Justice, 2022).

Conclusion and the Conditions Attached to It

Weighing both sides, the defensible recommendation for Fairhaven is adoption, but conditional adoption rather than a straight purchase. The behavioral claim should be set aside: the Washington trial and the pooled review make it unreasonable to promise the council that force or complaints will drop. The evidentiary claim survives, and it survives precisely because it does not depend on changing anyone's conduct. Footage of the twelve disputed encounters would have existed whether or not the officers involved behaved any differently, and that record is what the later stages of the system currently lack.

Three conditions make the recommendation defensible. First, a written policy adopted before a single camera is issued, covering when recording begins and ends, how long footage is retained, and who may request its release. Second, a phased purchase of 30 cameras assigned to the busiest shift for one year, with the department publishing how many complaints were resolved by footage. Third, a stated comparison, so that the council judges the second year against the first rather than against a figure supplied by a vendor or a result reported by a department in another state.

A conclusion also has to name what would overturn it. If the first year produces usable footage in fewer than half of the disputed complaints, the evidentiary argument fails on its own terms and the money should move to the crisis response position instead. Presenting the decision in that form is more honest than promising a reduction the research does not support, and it treats the council as a body capable of weighing a policy question rather than approving a purchase order. Naming that threshold in advance also keeps the later review honest, because the standard is fixed before anyone involved has an interest in where the number lands.

References

Ariel, B., Farrar, W. A., & Sutherland, A. (2015). The effect of police body-worn cameras on use of force and citizens' complaints against the police: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 31(3), 509-535. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-014-9236-3

Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2022). Contacts between police and the public, 2020. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs. https://bjs.ojp.gov/

Hyland, S. S. (2018). Body-worn cameras in law enforcement agencies, 2016. Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice. https://bjs.ojp.gov/

Lum, C., Koper, C. S., Wilson, D. B., Stoltz, M., Goodier, M., Eggins, E., Higginson, A., & Mazerolle, L. (2020). Body-worn cameras' effects on police officers and citizen behavior: A systematic review. Campbell Systematic Reviews, 16(3), e1112. https://doi.org/10.1002/cl2.1112

National Institute of Justice. (2022). Research on body-worn cameras and law enforcement. U.S. Department of Justice. https://nij.ojp.gov/

Yokum, D., Ravishankar, A., & Coppock, A. (2019). A randomized control trial evaluating the effects of police body-worn cameras. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(21), 10329-10332. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1814773116