Radley Balko: Even just a presumption that any missing footage would have benefitted the party opposing the police would probably work.

This narrative has been pushed by heterodox types for years. It never made much sense.

Well, well, well. WELL. That whole “protests made cops feel bad so they all quit” narrative? Looks like it was mostly myth. Excited to read this paper by Ben Grunwald, who compiled a huge dataset on post-2020 police employment. Agg decline was 1%… and bigger local declines not tied to protests.

Definitely a myth, but it would have been good, actually, if abuse-prone police had quit en masse.

if body cams actually worked, we'd probably have gotten at least a small wave of the most corrupt and abusive cops quitting now that they couldn't keep on getting away with it quite so easily (body cams don't seem to work for their supposed purpose at all, though)

Yeah, I was skeptical about “wear body cams” as a proposal when the police who murdered Laquan McDonald in Chicago destroyed their dash cams to hide the evidence. The cop who pulled the trigger was convicted (amazingly) but the accomplices were acquitted.

Feel like an easy fix would be passing a law saying "no arrest can be made if the body cams aren't working during it" suddenly a lot of technical issues would resolve themselves.

Even just a presumption that any missing footage would have benefitted the party opposing the police would probably work.

We had that for like a year in New Mexico, and before we could tell if it was working, the legislature made the presumption optional.

Delaware a few years ago amended its statute about the use of witnesses’ voluntary statements to police as trial evidence to specifically instruct the court to consider the failure to record the statement when determining whether the statement was truly voluntary.

Also, police chiefs who release video the same day if it favors a killing by a cop, but stall and delay releasing if it incriminates.

Reminds me of the cops who planted drugs, then “turned on”the body cams, but didn’t know “turn on” means “save the video its been recording starting from X minutes ago”

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