Police forces around the world have invested heavily in Body Worn Cameras.
However, there is little research on the admissibility and use in legal proceedings of recordings made by these devices. This project is concerned with one particular use – the recording of a complainant’s initial statement of events when police attend a call for assistance where there has been an allegation of domestic or family violence. Most Australian jurisdictions now have legislation that enables such recordings to be played in court in lieu of a complainant’s testimony.
Objectives
The aim of this interdisciplinary project involving researchers from Melbourne Law School, the University of Sydney, and the University of Warwick, is to discover the ways in which use of Body Worn Cameras to record complainants’ statements influence legal decision-makers’ assessments of a complainant’s credibility and the reliability of their evidence. This form of evidence differs significantly from that which the legal system has traditionally relied upon – testimony provided by the complainant when they appear as a witness in the legal proceeding.
Yet the implications of these differences have so far been overlooked. The effect of factors such as lighting, camera angle, distance of the complainant from the camera, objects visible in the background of a recording, and the emotional effect of these factors on juries’ and judges’ assessments of the credibility of complainants has not been investigated. These issues will be systematically explored in a series of experiments.
Publications
Articles
- C. Gattinara, A. Roberts and C. van Golde, ‘Emotionality in Domestic Violence Evidence-in-Chief: Towards Unbiased and Rational Legal Fact-finding, (2026) Current Issues in Criminal Justice (forthcoming). [SSRN pre-publication draft]
- A. Roberts and D. Ormerod, ‘The Full Picture or Too Much Information? Evidential Use of Body-Worn Camera Recordings’ [2021] Criminal Law Review 620-643
- C. Smith, J. Davis, and A. Roberts, ‘Probative or Prejudicial: The Biasing Effects of Background Information in Police Body-Worn Video Evidence on Mock-Juror Decisions in Victim Depressed Domestic Abuse Cases, (2019) PsyArXiv (19 August)
Meet the team
Partner Institutions
