(07-17-2017 10:34 AM)Kaplony Wrote:  

(07-17-2017 10:14 AM)umbluegray Wrote:  

(07-17-2017 09:56 AM)john01992 Wrote:  

(07-17-2017 08:25 AM)Lord Stanley Wrote:  Maybe we could all wait 24 hours before casting aspersions and making wild claims?

It really is revolting how quick you are to judge when it suits your agenda but when it doesn't THAT is when you preach "let's wait and see"

Meanwhile.....

*Police were trying to determine whether any video of the incident exists. The body cameras of the officers involved were not activated, according to police.*

Yeah, I saw that and it jumped out at me.

However, I don't know the law in Minneapolis. Are they required to have them on? If so, how long has that policy been in place? If not, what conditions dictate turning them on or off?

I might find it plausible if one office forgot to turn the body cam on, but it's statistically more questionable if every officer "forgot".

Could be for any number of reasons.

Because of the cost of storage and/or the amount of available memory in the cameras and/or the battery life of the cameras some departments requires the officers while on routine patrol to turn them off. This cuts down on the total amount of data they have to store and it doesn't require a supervisor to review an entire shift of video, most of which would be looking out the window of a patrol car. Perhaps they had this policy and the officers simply forgot to turn them on in the heat of the moment. I know several officers, firefighters, and medics who despite doing it every time they got out of the car have forgotten to turn on their handheld radio when getting out at an active scene. Our Battalion Chief with the FD was hopping mad at us one night because we didn't answer him only to find out he hadn't turned on his radio when he got out of his truck.

The batteries could have died in the cameras. Because these things cost so much to purchase and most especially to store the data and typically aren't specifically funded without robbing Peter to pay Paul in the department's budget sometimes corners are cut to save a buck and when you buy replacement batteries you get what you pay for. We suffered through that with the FD and off brand replacement batteries for our handhelds. They could show full charge and wouldn't last an hour on an incident. It got so bad that at my station all three shifts pitched in and bought Motorola batteries for all of our handhelds out of our own pocket.

Most dash cams are now set to only activate when either manually turned on or when the emergency lights are activated to reduce the amount of data to be stored. Typically the camera is recording but not saving beyond a set period of time prior to activation. I know ours would automatically save the previous 240 seconds prior to the camera being activated either manually or by the emergency lights.