‘We’re recording you too, bud:’ body-worn cameras, citizen journalism, and the changing landscape of police visibility

The widespread adoption of body-worn cameras (BWCs) has transformed the landscape of police visibility. While BWCs are commonly understood as technologies for evidence collection and police accountability, less attention has been paid to how police officers themselves understand the technology as a means of responding to citizen journalism. Drawing on interviews with frontline officers from one of Canada's largest municipal police services, this paper examines how officers understand and mobilise BWCs in relation to citizen-recorded footage. Participants commonly described citizen journalism as producing incomplete or misleading representations of police work while positioning BWC footage as more complete, more credible, and more likely to become the authoritative account of contested police-citizen encounters. Drawing on visibility theory and visual criminology, we argue that BWCs and citizen journalism constitute competing visibility regimes through which different visual constructions of police-citizen encounters are produced. We conclude that the significance of BWCs lies not simply in their ability to record police work, but in officers’ belief that police-generated footage possesses the greatest capacity to acquire institutional recognition and visual authority.