How do police videos get released

December 9, 2006 9:54 AM

Police Incar Videos: How do they get released to the public/youtube?

I saw a video on Reddit this morning of a police officer forgetting to put his car in park before getting out of the car. It made me wonder, how do these video's get released?

posted by SirStan to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

There was a somewhat famous clip from a police surveilance camera of a man who had been arrested and was being detained in a temporary holding area while he was being processed who just casually took a sip of water from a bottle and then pulled out a gun from his pocket and shot himself in the head. It was supposedly circulated among law enforcement departments nationwide as training material, to demonstrate how essential it is to always make sure suspects have been properly patted down. It was leaked somewhere along the lines by some officer who came into contact with it, and now you can probably find it on a half dozen video sites.

My point in mentioning this is that officers are humans too, and when they see something that is astounding (or just plain funny, as in the case of the clip you're talking about) they tend to want to spread it around just like anyone else. In this day of youtube and dozens of knock-off sites, it's very simple to anonymously upload or host a clip, so the barrier to distribution is essentially non-existant.
posted by Rhomboid at 11:47 AM on December 9, 2006

Also there is shows like "worlds scariest police chases" and various others. A person can record it on their PC, cut clips, and post them on the internet.
posted by Sonic_Molson at 12:50 PM on December 9, 2006

Sure.. but where do the scariest police chases get their videos?
posted by SirStan at 1:05 PM on December 9, 2006

An article in today's Eugene (Oregon) Registar-Guard has some things to say on this issue...

Some officers initially resisted the concept of having their every move recorded and subject to state public records law.

Oregon law requires officers to alert people to the fact that their statements are being recorded. The law does not apply to visual recordings.

At the end of each shift, officers remove the hard drive and upload the footage to a server in the department's report-writing room at City Hall.

Officers can view only their own footage and cannot make secondary recordings of images stored in the server. The system keeps a log of who looked at which file and when.
Supervisors have access to all the information and regularly review it to ensure officers are following protocol, Pieske said.

Defendants can obtain copies of recordings through the discovery process. The recordings are subject to Oregon public records law.

The agency is still negotiating a handful of issues with the police employees' union, Kerns said. Those issues include when officers are required to record, who gets access to the footage and why, and how the footage is used in disciplinary investigations.
posted by neuron at 1:34 PM on December 9, 2006

As someone who knows several police officer's personally they do it themselves for all of the aforementioned reasons.
posted by imjosh at 7:02 AM on December 11, 2006