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Comment by txru | Hacker News Reader

While bodycams are generally a good and necessary thing, a general pattern that's now widespread is officers selectively covering up and turning off their cameras or putting up their car hoods during stops to avoid accountability and create selective narratives. And those are things that are supposed to be directly connected to their person. A helicam has many more degrees of freedom, and much less observability.

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This is easily addressed. any evidence coming from such an encounter gets tossed. Cop claims they got assaulted by someone and had their hood up or their body cam was malfunctioning or covered up? Gets thrown out and charges stemming from the stop itself are dismissed. Civilian died in that situation and there was a similar problem? All cops on the scene are mandatorily charged with manslaughter - no prosecutorial discretion is allowed and a federal prosecutor is appointed.

A fig leaf of cops acting like gangsters is surprisingly quite easy to remove.

In theory, yes. In practice, what legal resources does the average person have to bring a case? How do their political connections compare? Oh, they died, no one saw, here’s a voucher. Have you looked at the odds of a cop getting charged with manslaughter lately?

And that’s just some positive action. Good luck proving there was malintent behind a helicam strategically losing focus, youre proving a negative.

Any death that involves a cop should be investigate by federal prosecutors. There’s a lot of deaths at the hands of cops, but not enough that you can’t investigate them.

Ultimately, if you keep this up the deaths go down and there’s less to prosecute.

Somehow other countries are able to have police that don’t regularly murder the people they’re policing and whose body cams seem to be functioning correctly. A very small portion of cops are responsible for the bulk of issues but the political culture around police and police unions keeps a horrible status quo around.

Agreed - police should be compelled to ensure the same level of diligence with their body cams as I'm sure they do to ensuring their sidearm is loaded at the start of the shift.

Throwing away the evidence doesn’t help victims of police abuse though.

I'm surprised such actions aren't treated like spoliation, in which the court assumes the worst of evidence intentionally destroyed by a party.

Police departments in the US are so corrupt that most of their abuse never gets to a court room in the first place.

How common is this pattern? I've gone about this at length in my comment history, but I think people drastically overestimate how often that happens. It's rare enough that I've never seen it after looking into dozens of use of force events by my local PD. Not saying it never happens, but usually there's a good explanation for lacking body cam footage (like the officer was off duty or undercover). It's actually somewhat reassuring that a lot of the time you'll see cops reminding each other to turn their cameras on, or freaking out if it falls off during a scuffle and they can't find it.

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