Smile for the camera: Game officials test body cams to reduce abuses

The referee never saw it coming.

Albert Peyton Coffin was working an eighth-grade basketball game in Kenmore, Washington when a brief skirmish broke out just after the final buzzer. Suddenly, the father of one of the players, a 6-foot-6 former college basketball player, charged onto the court, yelling, "No one touches my son." He rammed his forearm into the back of the 72-year-old Coffin, knocking him face-first onto the hardwood, breaking his nose, cheekbone and two ribs, according to court records.

The December 2021 incident alarmed interscholastic sports officials in Washington. For years, they had been concerned about the barrage of vulgar insults, threats and downright disrespect their members faced while officiating games.

Youth leagues across the country are raising similar alarms about how to restore civility and safety after a nationwide surge in abuse primarily targeting referees and umpires. Various attempts at solutions, including legislative efforts to impose tougher civil and criminal penalties, have not given officials the comfort level they seek, and many are choosing to leave the profession rather than tolerate the abuse. With officiating shortages looming in some states, the search for solutions is growing more intense.

Coffin's assault raised the concern to a new level.

"We had been talking about these escalating behaviors and the fact that we have to do something," said Mick Howard, executive director of the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association, which oversees school sports in the state. "The question was: What could we do proactively?"

A promising answer came when the association heard about a demonstration project in which referees in a British men's recreational soccer league wore body cameras to discourage abusive behavior. Washington school officials began their own experiment earlier this year, becoming the first state in the country to equip referees and umpires with the devices.

"Every year we were struggling with trying to find ways to slow down this abusive behavior," said Todd Stordahl, executive director of the Washington Officials Association, the governing body for 4,500 referees, umpires and others who officiate interscholastic sports in the state. "We heard about the trial they were doing in the U.K., and we were like, why don't we try this?"

The two Washington groups struck a deal with Reveal Media, a British manufacturer, to launch a pilot program with 100 cameras. Washington officials bought 50 at $500 apiece, and Reveal donated the other 50. In January, referees who volunteered to take part in the experiment were outfitted with the devices. The experiment continued in the spring with soccer officials, as well as softball and baseball umpires.

Before the start of each game, officials tell coaches and team captains about the cameras, and they briefly activate them to demonstrate how the devices work. The cameras record and delete video on a 30-second loop. Officials are instructed to switch them to continuous-record mode when they encounter problematic situations that they consider "triggers," such as fights, court storming, discriminatory or harassing behavior and instances when officials call fouls for unsportsmanlike conduct.

Washington athletic officials have not fully analyzed data documenting how frequently officials activated the cameras or their impact on the number of technical fouls and ejections that occurred. Still, they said, the informal feedback they have heard from umpires and referees who have used them has been overwhelmingly positive.

Reveal conducted a survey earlier this year of 48 officials who used the devices, and nearly half said players and spectators seemed to behave differently after the cameras were introduced. Half said that they experienced less abuse while officiating games. Nothing has surfaced to call those survey results into question, but Reveal does have a commercial stake in the matter. Its survey results have not been confirmed independently, although Stordahl described the feedback he's received so far as positive.

"The comments from the officials who wore them are that the temperature in the room was definitely lowered with the cameras," he said. "If we can lower that temperature so crazy stuff doesn't turn stupid, then that's good."

The experience of officials in Washington tracks with those of sports organizations in Canada and Britain that have outfitted officials with body cameras, according to Reveal.

"The early findings are that the cameras have been a really good de-escalation tool," said Matthew Heptonstall, the company's strategic development executive.

The lightweight, rectangular devices are about the size of a matchbox, and they attach magnetically to chest harnesses worn by officials. A video screen faces out from the camera, allowing people to see themselves as they approach officials.

"They refer to that as the de-escalation screen," Stordahl said. "The idea is that once you see yourself getting out of control, most times you are going to stop."

"It's human nature," Howard explained, when asked about the cameras' impact. "When you know you are being watched, you back off, right? The people who do not, then you have a bigger problem anyway."

Youth sports officials around the country are closely watching the Washington experiment. "It's just sad that it's come to this," said Jon Solomon, community impact director of the Aspen Institute's Sports and Society Program. "The bottom line is if someone is going to be so outrageous, so mad [that they would assault an official], I don't know that a body camera would prevent them from doing something. But does a camera cause people to think twice, before they reach the boiling point?"

Solomon Alexander, director of the St. Louis Sports Foundation, said he has heard about shocking levels of disrespect and even violence directed at umpires and referees in and around his city, where a major drive is in progress to improve civility in sports . He called the body camera experiment one worth trying, although he was not sure whether cameras would necessarily curtail the unruly behavior of some people. "If seeing myself on camera acting like a fool makes me not act like a fool, then that works," he said. "If it embarrasses me and makes me angrier and makes it worse for the kids, then it is not a good thing. So, it's really wait and see, to gauge how they work."

Reveal's cameras were first deployed for athletic events in February 2023, when the English Football Association launched a trial in some of its men's amateur soccer leagues. The devices seemed to cut down on abuse of officials, and the association plans to double the number of cameras it uses to 200 beginning this month. Amateur soccer officials in Ontario began a 50-camera trial last August. Heptonstall said several other sports associations, including an Australian recreational soccer organization, have expressed interest in the devices.

Howard said the sports leagues that have reached out to Reveal are all struggling with the same issue: bad behavior by fans, coaches and players, which he said seems to have intensified in recent years. "Behavior has deteriorated, particularly since Covid," Heptonstall said.

In a 2023 survey by the National Association of Sports Officials, more than half of respondents in the U.S. said they feared for their safety or felt threatened while overseeing athletic events. Nearly one in eight respondents said they had been assaulted at some point in their careers, and almost 7 in 10 felt that overall sportsmanship was on the decline, according to the survey, which canvassed more than 35,000 officials.

The deteriorating landscape has left many sports organizations struggling to find people to officiate their events. In Washington, at least a third of middle and high school game officials quit in their first season, Stordahl said. Most depart without explanation. Among those who cited a reason, most pointed to the disrespect they regularly faced while carrying out their duties.

With high school officials in the state earning between $65 and $72 a game, and their middle school counterparts earning about $10 a game less, money offers little incentive for officials to tolerate abuse.

"You get these officials in, you train them, you get them going, then you lose them because they come to think that it's not worth their time to do this if they are going to face abuse," Stordahl said.

Through the years, sports officials in Washington have issued more warnings, ramped up ejections and, on rare occasions, abruptly ended games to control unruly behavior. But the impact has been, at best, mixed. State legislators in Washington -- like lawmakers in several other states -- even proposed legislation this year to toughen penalties for people who assault game officials, putting them in a separate category like teachers and bus drivers. But that legislation stalled.

Given the promising results from the body camera experiment, Washington sports officials plan to continue the trial in the fall and hope to buy more of the devices as their finances allow.

"If it turns out that it doesn't work, then we'll scrap it," Howard said. "If it looks like it's working, we'll continue to grow it. And preliminary results are that it's working."

Nonetheless, not every sports official likes the idea of wearing what amounts to a surveillance device. Among the skeptics is Coffin, the veteran referee assaulted in 2021.

"I'm kind of ambivalent about them," he said. "I think they're intrusive."

Coffin began officiating in 1975, when he would occasionally work as a baseball umpire. Through the years, he has refereed or umpired thousands of games, mostly in baseball, basketball and volleyball.

He said he has had just a handful of serious confrontations over all that time and calls his 2021 assault an anomaly. He thinks that everything worked out well in its aftermath. His assailant, Mark Robert McLaughlin, pleaded guilty last year to third-degree assault. A judge sentenced him to anger management therapy and to pay restitution to Coffin.

"I missed the rest of that season, but I was able to get paid for that," Coffin said. "Luckily, he had an insurance policy."

Coffin returned to officiating, even though now, at age 75, he said he has cut down on his workload but still enjoys being on the field and court with young athletes. He said his decades of experience have taught him how to manage foul-mouthed coaches, heckling fans and disrespectful young players without the help of an unblinking camera.

Considering the way McLaughlin pummeled Coffin while the referee's back was turned, it is unclear whether a body camera would have helped de-escalate the situation or even have helped Coffin document what happened.

Advocates of camera usage see it not as a total solution to abuse but rather as one additional tool in the effort to improve civility.

"The idea is to not get into arguments like you sometimes see umpires and referees doing on television," Coffin said. "You have to learn to do a little verbal judo and find ways to lower the temperature."