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Comment by CocaKoala | Hacker News Reader

Police DO wear body cameras! For example, there was a shooting in Albuquerque, with five police officers present, and all five officers were wearing cameras.

Unfortunately, all five cameras malfunctioned at exactly the same time and none of them captured footage of the shooting [1].

What a crazy, unlikely circumstance.

[1]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180624/18081640105/anoth...

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It seems only reasonable that in such cases not only are the police guilty by default of whatever they're accused of, they're also guilty of destroying evidence and should be charged accordingly.

Only if you can prove the malfeasance.

When all five body cameras "happened" to fail at the same time I don't think anyone can really doubt the malfeasance.

While likely that is the case, unless there are ways to detect tampering built into the camera, it can't be proved in a court

Yeah, but who did it? All five of them, one of them, another cop not at the scene but with access to the system? Contractors with system access? It's not enough to be sure that a crime happened. Which isn't to say there shouldn't be an investigation or measures taken to make it harder to happen.

And to be more careful, what's the failure rate on those cameras and how many incidents happen a year where it would look suspicious if all cameras fail? If the numbers are high enough we might just have selection bias.

The officers should be on the hook for their video feed.

"can really doubt" doesn't work in court, though. Innocent until proven guilty and all that - if there's no actual evidence of tampering you'd struggle to win a conviction.

And when that black guy that was just gunned down "happened" to have a knife in his pocket when searched there's no doubt that he was only seconds away from using it to attack the police?

While I agree there was probably not malfunction of five cameras simultaneously the presumption of innocence is too important to our society to undermine it in any situation, even this one. We must find the evidence that the cameras were sabotaged or otherwise lost their data. No issue is worth undermining our basic principles.

Sounds like there should be a rule: If your camera isn't recording, you aren't on duty.

Yeah I'm calling this badge-equivalence. The camera (with active indicator light) is the badge. If you don't have a badge you're not a police officer. If you don't have a camera you're not a police officer. The only thing that curbs my enthusiasm for this is the privacy rights of other parties. Not sure how to deal with that but I don't think it should derail the whole thing.

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