Two new grants totaling roughly $290,000 will support a team of university researchers in developing innovative technology for analyzing police body-worn camera (BWC) footage. The grants have been awarded by  Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science Innovation Fund and Princeton Language and Intelligence (PLI).

Collaborators on the project include Criminal Justice @ SPIA faculty member Jonathan Mummolo, associate professor of politics and public affairs; Brandon Stewart, associate professor of sociology; Olga Russakovsky, associate professor of computer science; and Dean Knox, assistant professor of operations, information and decisions and statistics and data science at the Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania.

The project aims to create an open-source, transparent technology for large-scale analysis of policy body-worn camera (BWC) footage. Using machine learning-based vision analysis techniques, the team is working to develop a tool that can automatically convert large amounts of BWC footage into detailed timelines. While police departments across the United States have collected a vast amount of data from body cameras, the footage is rarely used or analyzed. This project has the potential to transform untouched footage into a rich new source of information on police-civilian interactions that can be analyzed by researchers as well as enhance oversight in police departments.

The ongoing research has also received support from Princeton’s Data-Driven Social Science Initiative and a Project X grant from the School of Engineering and Applied Science.