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Article snippet: After a series of high-profile police shootings, police departments across the nation turned to body cameras, hoping they would curb abuses. But a rigorous study released Friday shows that they have almost no effect on officer behavior. The 18-month study of more than 2,000 police officers in Washington found that officers equipped with cameras used force and prompted civilian complaints at about the same rate as those who did not have them. Advocates for body cameras — including police officers, lawmakers and citizens in high-crime neighborhoods — have long argued that requiring officers to wear the devices would have a “civilizing effect” on both officers and the civilians who encounter them. After the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American man, in Ferguson, Mo., calls for their use became more widespread. By 2015, 95 percent of large police departments reported they were using body cameras or had committed to doing so in the near future, according to a national survey. The federal government has given police departments more than $40 million to invest in body cameras, and state and local authorities have spent many millions more. But, the authors of the new study cautioned, “these results suggest we should recalibrate our expectations” for body cameras to lead to “large-scale behavioral change in policing, particularly in contexts similar to Washington, D.C.” Chief Peter Newsham of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washing... Link to the full article to read more