Alabama is among the most restrictive states for disclosing body-camera footage when police kill loved ones. Surviving family members often must go to court to get access to the video, and even if successful, they usually can’t share it publicly.
The footage should be in a publicly available national database. From all bodycam’s, from all police, they shouldn’t even have a choice in the matter. If they can turn them off conveniently when they are about to do crimes, or withhold the evidence like this, they are pointless.
In my opinion, any time police are accused of anything, or an officer’s word is challenged in court, and they don’t have bodycam footage to back up their side, they should be automatically disbelieved as a matter of course. If it means a few criminals get off because of legitimate hardware failures, so be it… if the entire case was riding on police testimony, it wasn’t a strong case to begin with.
I mostly agree, but the video should only be accessible to law enforcement involved in that recording, prosecutors, and other possible related legal jobs, and family of those recorded. A lot of personal information could be on any given video.
The footage should be in a publicly available national database. From all bodycam’s, from all police, they shouldn’t even have a choice in the matter. If they can turn them off conveniently when they are about to do crimes, or withhold the evidence like this, they are pointless.
In my opinion, any time police are accused of anything, or an officer’s word is challenged in court, and they don’t have bodycam footage to back up their side, they should be automatically disbelieved as a matter of course. If it means a few criminals get off because of legitimate hardware failures, so be it… if the entire case was riding on police testimony, it wasn’t a strong case to begin with.
I mostly agree, but the video should only be accessible to law enforcement involved in that recording, prosecutors, and other possible related legal jobs, and family of those recorded. A lot of personal information could be on any given video.