Spatial Equity in Police Surveillance: Auditing Body-Worn Camera Deployment in Washington, D.C.

Source abstract

Urban surveillance infrastructure is a form of public service deployment subject to the same equity standards as other spatially distributed urban systems. This study examines the geographic distribution of body-worn camera (BWC)-equipped officer density produced by the Metropolitan Police Department’s (MPD) 2015–2017 randomized controlled trial across Washington, D.C.’s eight wards, asking whether a formally neutral police technology deployment produced unequal per-capita densities across the city’s racially and socioeconomically stratified urban landscape. Using officer-level BWC assignment data drawn from the trail’s publicly available replication files, aggregated from police districts to wards through a population-weighted spatial crosswalk, the analysis compares BWC-equipped officer density between majority-Black, east-of-Anacostia Wards 7–8 and majority-White, northwest Wards 2–3, and tests associations with ward-level demographic and socioeconomic indicators. Cameras were assigned to officers at an essentially constant rate across districts (approximately 50%), so ward-level variation in density reflects the underlying distribution of officers rather than the camera-assignment mechanism. Descriptively, Wards 7–8 showed a modestly higher mean density than Wards 2–3 (3.31 vs. 3.15 BWC-equipped officers per 1000 residents; a difference of approximately 5%), but the comparison did not reach statistical significance, and ward-level density was uncorrelated with the percentage of Black residents (r = 0.008). These inferential results are statistically inconclusive given the small number of geographic units rather than affirmative evidence of equitable distribution. A more direct secondary measure BWC activations (recordings) per capita shows a modestly larger focal-ward gap (approximately 11%) that is likewise non-significant and uncorrelated with racial composition (r = 0.05). This convergence corroborates rather than overturns the primary measure, indicating that the null is not an artifact of how exposure is operationalized. The findings are interpreted as exploratory and descriptive: officers and therefore cameras were not distributed in proportion to residential population, which locates any equity concern upstream in deployment intensity rather than in the camera technology itself and motivates spatially explicit equity monitoring as a component of sustainable urban governance.