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Comment by rmc | Hacker News Reader

It can also be very benefital for police aswell. It's a great defence against claims of police brutality and abuse. "That cop pushed me!" "We looked at the video, he didn't."

It's win win and helps make everyone honest.

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Unless it's recorded, there's a good chance they won't believe you. Oh, you have a bruise? That could have been caused by anything. Judges and juries tend to side with cops. So cops have little to gain by recording everything, which is of course why they are generally against it. They outlawed it in Illinois before it was overturned.

"Judges and juries tend to side with cops."

I see that becoming less and less true… A couple of recent examples locally:

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/cctv-exposes-police-lie-20120705-2...

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/tasered-for-not-showing-his-ticket...

It may becoming less true, with less meaning 95 rather than 100 percent of the time. There is tremendous inertia and precedent in the legal system to side with the officer over the citizen. This, along with judicial familiarity with local law enforcement (most traffic and municipal disputes by definition are raised by a few officers in a given jurisdiction) almost guarantee the lack of the possibility of fairness.

Amazing cases. Hope little brother continues to root out police abuse of citizens.

The part that bothers me about the first case linked is that the officers were submitted to an internal investigation. They should have been arrested as soon as the video evidence came to light. There is far too little willingless to arrest and imprison officers that betray public trust. I know it's also this way in the US; it's incredibly rare to see an officer fired, much less imprisoned.

Not "we looked at the video", but "here, take a look at this video". Don't trust the police to self-determine if they're at fault.

Minneapolis claims that in the majority of cases, video of police encounters exonerates officers and eliminates frivolous claims.

That could be because in many of the cases where the police have done something wrong, they destroyed/confiscated evidence of that wrongdoing.

I have no idea what you're trying to say. So... what... you think the police shouldn't endorse recording of police encounters? Because I was giving an example of the police doing that.

You said that video usually supports the officers' statements, and not the civilians' statements, according to the official statistics. However, those statistics could actually be quite distorted, if the police regularly destroyed the video in those cases in which they were at fault.

I'm basically just saying that the statistics could be misleading.

I would think that if there was a general rule of police recording their stops, the lack of recording in a contested situation might be damning in itself.

At least in Ohio most police cruisers are setup to record video+audio of stops and the police are supposed to use them at every stop. Whether or not that happens I don't know.

Except it doesn't. Copy have had video in their cars for years but when abuse comes up it's generally off camera or the footage gets "lost". Both sides should be recording.

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