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As more police departments adopt body cameras (BCs), there is a hope that the devices will help usher in a new era of police accountability. Turning to the first online archive of BC footage, this article examines the emergent possibilities and problems that arise when human actors interact with technical designs in applied contexts. Communication affordance theory is used as a framework to situate the archive within discussions about police use of social media, visibility, transparency, and police-community relations. A web application using YouTube’s public API was used to analyze the usage and interaction statistics of the archive. Then, a focus group was conducted to discuss the usability of the archive and its benefits and drawbacks for police-community relations. Findings show that despite the visibility of social media, the videos have low view counts, little interaction, are not easily searchable, and raise more questions about police-community relations than they answer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an affordances framework, we consider how increased visibility afforded by social media impacts the criminal justice process. The use of social media as criminal evidence is a development that particularly impacts low-income populations of color already under heavy surveillance. Content analysis of seven gang indictments filed by the District Attorney (DA) of a large U.S. city that included a total of 1,281 overt acts of conspiracy revealed that social media provided associative evidence that tied defendants to incriminating content and to each other. We find that law enforcement's access to evidence expands through socially mediated visibility (SMV), and that social media affords prosecutors new tools to define and leverage defendants' associations as convictable criminal charges. This article explores the possibilities and problems of social media use in gang prosecution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]