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The knowledge they could be videotaped is changing the way police officers conduct themselves on the job — but that’s not always a good thing, according to a survey by an Ottawa police veteran.

Greg Brown is a local officer and a doctoral candidate who studied police consciousness of citizen-recorded video and social media.

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His findings have led him to worry that police officers may put themselves or the public in danger by engaging in “risk-averse policing” to avoid negative attention on the Internet.

Nearly three-quarters of the 231 veteran front-line Ottawa and Toronto police officers surveyed reported behavioural changes as a result of being aware that they were or could have been recorded on video by a private citizen. Roughly half the respondents said they use less physical force, and less often, than they would if it wasn’t so likely that they’d be captured on video.

The study, published this month by Oxford University Press in the British Journal of Criminology Advance Access, came partly as a result of the author’s return to patrol work after 16 years in a desk job with Ottawa police.