Understanding the success and failure of police innovation
Body-worn cameras are one of the most recent technological innovations introduced in police organizations. Adopted with the aim of offering greater transparency and improving interactions between police officers and citizens, in recent years these devices have attracted the attention of both researchers and the popular press. However, despite their obvious popularity and several pilot projects, few police organizations in Canada have adopted them. Drawing on the socio-technical approach and the Actor-Network Theory, this article explores the socio-technical context of the adoption of body-worn cameras by examining the development and implementation of a pilot project at the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal. Based on content analysis, this study highlights the diversity of actors and negotiations that led to the use of body-worn cameras and details how interaction between the sometimes divergent interests of the actors, including privacy protection, economic considerations, and the goal of offering greater transparency, appears to have compromised their successful introduction. Our analysis emphasizes the need to take into account the role of the socio-technical context in the success or failure of the implementation of innovations such as body-worn cameras.