ABSTRACT
This chapter reports on today’s state of police body-worn camera (BWC) implementation throughout the Canadian policing landscape and contrasts present Canadian circumstances with the American police BWC experience to date. This assessment is situated within a broader and conceptual discussion around the recent techno-social phenomenon of “policing’s new visibility” (Brown 2016; Goldsmith 2010) and interrelated considerations implicating the socio-political construct of accountability. The author advances that accountability and visibility/transparency, as they relate to front-line police work throughout Western societies (including the United States and Canada), have intersected, and effectively comingled, to such a degree that they are now, for all intents and purposes, conflated in their everyday understandings and operationalization across both policing and the public sphere. In other words, today it is widely understood that the visibility of police actions in the field constitutes, and is now relied on as, the principal mechanism to ensure police accountability. The author predicts that given this contemporary reality, the trajectory toward increasing police BWC program implementations will undoubtedly continue, as more and more jurisdictions, including those throughout Canada, recognize that visibility is the new accountability.
