St. Louis police dash cam shows part of contested arrest

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

St. Louis police dash cam shows part of contested arrest
| February 18, 2015

ST. LOUIS (AP) — A recently released video of an arrest in which St. Louis police are accused of using excessive force shows officers pulling a resisting suspect from a car, kicking him and shocking him with a stun gun before the camera is shut off abruptly.

The dashboard camera video ends after an officer involved in the April 2014 arrest of Cortez Bufford yells, in part, "Everybody hold up. We're red right now!" the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (http://bit.ly/1Amp468 ) reported this week.

Joel Schwartz and Bevis Schock, the attorneys who filed suit on behalf of Bufford last month in St. Louis Circuit Court, say "red" is cop slang for a running camera. They say the video, which they released, supports their case that police lacked probable cause and applied excessive force in the arrest. The charges against Bufford of unlawful use of a weapon and resisting arrest were later dropped.

A circuit attorney's spokeswoman, Susan Ryan, told the newspaper the case was dismissed because "the action of turning off the dash cam video diminished the evidentiary merits of the case." She also said a review showed the officers did not break the law.




Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/us/article/St-Louis-police-dash-cam-shows-part-of-contested-6088626.php

[Xipe Totec]

1. the officers did not break the law, by turning off the camera?

isn't that tampering with evidence? At least?

[duhneece]

2. This is the weirdest, most incomprehensible bit of bs

And there's a lot of bs out there.

[LiberalFighter]

3. They probably don't have a law in any state yet

that prohibits turning off a video device. Most likely just a local policy that is enforceable at the whim of authorities.

[Xipe Totec]

4. Tampering with evidence

When police confiscate and destroy a citizen's photographs or recordings of officers' misconduct, the police's act of destroying the evidence may be prosecuted as an act of evidence tampering, if the recordings being destroyed are potential evidence in a criminal or regulatory investigation of the officers themselves.[2] In a notable case in Nebraska, officers were charged with the felony charge of evidence tampering, as well as misdemeanor obstruction and theft, when they committed brutality and forcibly stole and destroyed the recordings, which was exposed due to a third party's recording.[3] On the other hand, when police departments lose exonerating evidence that would create reasonable doubt for defendants in the cases they prosecute, such as dashboard-camera footage from patrol cars, it may be regarded as spoliation of evidence, potentially justifying motions to dismiss and/or mistrials. Police's loss of evidence such as footage may be considered as both spoliation and tampering, if it both exonerates the defendant and proves police misconduct. Spoliation of exonerating evidence in criminal cases may also constitute prosecutorial misconduct if the prosecutor is complicit in doing so.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampering_with_evidence

[LTG]

6. the law hasnt caught up with the technology

Unfortunately the statutes regarding tampering with evidence, as in the examples in your wiki quote, primarily deal with the loss or destruction of existing evidence. Evidence must exist to be tampered with, at least in a traditional approach. Unless the statutes have been recently updated to apply, or new ones passed prohibiting officers from turning off recording devices to prevent the creation of exonerating evidence, the only sanctions the officers face will be departmental ones for violation of police department policy.

As citizen outcry for police body cameras becomes louder and more urgent the state legislatures must create statutes, with real and serious legal sanctions, governing their use, and misuse. The cameras will not serve to protect the public as long as they are regulated solely as a matter of police departmental policy.

[C Moon]

5. "We're red right now!" That's scary: that they have a term for when they can and can't beat us up.