Comment by kkielhofner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kkielhofner | Hacker News Reader

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To my knowledge this is managed by the body cam vendors with the kinds of protections/assurances you would expect for something that will need to pass evidentiary chain of custody, etc for something to withstand scrutiny in court:

https://my.axon.com/s/article/Uploading-and-charging-with-th...

Almost kind of funny it uses the Axon-provided cloud at evidence.com. Not kidding.

What this boils down to: if the camera footage has been altered or is unavailable some shady cop/department went out of their way to do so. The workflow is extremely simple: hit the record button when you interact with the public, dock the camera (needs to charge anyway) at the end of your shift. There should be no wiggle room for excuses.

The vendors have packaged all of this up decently and something like "Oops we deleted that" should never be acceptable. Even the pre-record activation rolling buffer should eliminate nearly any "We missed that because I didn't have time to activate record" scenarios other than maybe "someone ran up on me out of nowhere and started shooting/attacking me".

Oh you "forgot" to press a button when you pulled someone over? You shouldn't be a cop, plain and simple.

(disclaimer: I was a software engineer at Axon)

It’s also worth noting that recording can be activated wirelessly by various triggers. The most obvious and common one being that a nearby officer’s camera was activated (either by physically pressing the button or via a chain reaction of wireless activations).

Depending on the available hardware/accessories & configuration, other sources of activation can include unholstering a weapon, aiming or discharging a taser, by computer aided dispatch, unlocking a weapon in the vehicle, activating the light bar, high vehicle speed, running, falling, crashing, and more.

In my opinion, if multiple officers are on the scene at least one axon recording device each: there is either video evidence or willful suppression of evidence. It’s that simple.

Publicly sharing hashes of video segments as they're created, would validate both the existence of, and unaltered nature of the video.

This is one of the few good use cases for a blockchain outside of crypto

Why is there a button at all? Record everything all the time. Sort it out later. The vast majority of it will be useless footage, but so what?

If I was a cop I would certainly want every donut I eat to be recorded if it also means there is no change I get falsely accused of improper interaction with the public. 99.9% of the time no one will look at my donut footage.

I believe it would be acceptable for the camera to be turned off when the police officer steps into a bathroom during a break to use the facilities.

OK, fair. But should still be default on.

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