thorn69

Most of the time the judges won't even allow public film to be used. Our dash-cams in our patrol cars are locked in a black box mounted on the dashboard with seals on them. The seals can only be unlocked by a select few and can never be opened by just one person at any time. The video inside the box is also transmitted instantly to the station and is recorded to their servers. Both the video on the dash-cam and the server have to match exactly and have to be authenticated to be admitted into court. Even then, I've seen judges not even allow our own video to be admitted. Usually it takes a really good lawyer for the defense to get the judge to invalidate our video. It's ALWAYS allowed however when the Officer needs it for his/her own personal defense no matter what.

Judges know that video can easily be tampered with and NO, it's not a "tell all" deal like you seem to think. There's a lot of factors that you can't see in videos. You'd know this if you had ever taken a photography class or went through a basic Police course or academy.

When I went through the Police Academy they showed us a video of a typical traffic stop by a State Police Officer. The Police Officer dismounted from his patrol car and approached the car he had pulled over and made his approach from the back driver side of the car. The next thing we saw was the Police Officer go for his duty weapon and start shooting into the car like a wild maniac. We all thought he had just gone nuts for some reason! Then the car just zoomed away in a straight beeline for about 50 feet and slammed into a telephone poll with the Police Officer still aiming down his weapons sights on the car the whole time like he was Dirty Hairy.

What the video didn't show us, was what was going on inside the car. (Blind Spots)

You see, inside that car was 2 black males that had just robbed a convenience store earlier in the evening and had killed the clerk in cold blood. The driver and passenger in the car waited for the Officer to get to the window so they could kill him as well. As soon as the Officer got to the window he noticed that the man in the passenger seat had a sawed-off shotgun aimed at him, but due to the way the Officer had "sliced the pie" when he approached the car, the passenger couldn't get a clear shot at him with his weapon. He would have ended up blowing his own friend's head off at that angle. The Officer went for his own weapon and commanded for the man to drop the shotgun. We couldn't really see this in the video because the Officer had his back to the dash camera and we couldn't hear this because the Instructors had the sound to the video turned off - on purpose.

When the man didn't comply the Officer started firing away into the car attempting to just kill the man with the shotgun. But the driver attempted to flee and was shot through his head by a round the Officer had intended to put into the chest of the man with the shotgun. The car continued to accelerate down the road because the "now dead" driver's foot was still on the gas pedal. The car crashed into a telephone poll at 20mph and that was the end of it. The man in the passenger seat with the shotgun had been shot once by the Officer and the round severed his spine leaving him a cripple for the rest of his life. He's also serving a life sentence for his criminal actions that night.

Then they played the video with the sound on and we heard EVERYTHING that was being said. The Officer had done his job and done his job well.

Of course the family of the driver tried to sue because they felt that the Officer had shot and killed an unarmed man in the head. But the lawsuit was eventually dropped once the family was shown the videos. First they watched the convenience store robbery where their precious "do-no-wrong" angle was the one that had blown the head off the store clerk - a defenseless 19 year old school boy who was just trying to pay his way through community college. The family tried to decline watching the video of their "do-no-wrong" angel getting his head blown off by the Police Officer but were forced to watch it by the Defense attorney representing the Officer involved.

I was told that the mother cried her eyes out after watching it but went up and hugged the Officer that had shot her son and thanked him for doing his job and said something like after 21 years, she never really knew who her son was!