Police Body-worn Cameras and A.I. Review: A Modest Research Agenda

Led by the School of Criminal Justice's Senior Executive Director John McCluskey, this talk will provide a brief overview of the adoption of police body‑worn cameras (BWC) in the U.S. and the expectations that BWCs would improve transparency and accountability. It will then confront the reality that departments now collect far more BWC footage than can be reviewed by humans.
 

In response to this volume, automated review, often built on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) derived from large language models, has become a commercially available option. McCluskey will outline the strengths and limits of these ASR/NLP systems and introduce a research project, with preliminary findings, aimed at understanding both the promise and the problems of using AI to review audio from BWC footage.