Having body cams on cops was the one of the best decisions we've made as a society in recent years. Not only do they flush out shitty cops like this, but they have also protected good cops from false accusations and violent people. They need to be required everywhere and cops must have them on their entire shifts or they'll face criminal investigations.
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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Don't u worry, Trump's on it.
https://www.propublica.org/article/drug-enforcement-administration-ends-body-camera-program-trump
Of course he is. President dipshit is on a mission to make everything worse
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“Protecting” yourself with a camera is pretty minimal. If the cop sees the dash cam they can grab it and destroy it. I was going to suggest the ACLU’s mobile justice app, but that got shut down. Anyone got a good app you can record with that can work on a locked phone?
Except that cops are stupid. Most of them don't delete video evidence most of the time. And destroying the camera itself produces evidence that can and will be used against them. And there's no excuse for taking one out of the car. They are also recording already, and can be quickly voice activated. So dash cams are not minimal.
You should also record on your phone.
Of course dirty cops could do tons of bad things, but the more complicated the cover-up is, the more likely that they get caught.
We need open source, multi channel dashcams that record to a central box that can be hidden deep inside the car and in times of duress, livestream via a connected smartphone. Press a button, the camera connects to a smartphone and triggers an app. All channels, audio and video, livestream out via the smartphone.
Or skip the cell phone pairing. Keep an eSIM in the recorder and upload it that way. Easier said than done, I suppose.
Blackvue has SIM card options with cloud storage. My blackvue 4K can do it But you have to pay a subscriber fee to them for the storage.
I bought it because it's the only camera I could find that could handle reading a license plate at 30 ft. I never activated the SIM features.
And their camera's processing and memory cards are all mounted on the windshield for some stupid reason.
Having a small discreet 4 or 6 channel camera that writes to an SSD hidden inside the car and has a 4g radio attachment, or even connects to a hotspot would be massive.
This would be much more expensive. It would also create a weak point. Cops tell cell phone carriers to kill that SIM and you’ll never notice. If it goes through your phone the cost is lower and you’ll notice a service interruption.
Hey, I planned that out over a period of about thirty seconds. My plan is solid!
I’ve been kicking this idea around for months. I just haven’t been able to solve all the problems with it. The biggest among them is small wide angle low light cameras with decent frame rate and resolution are NOT cheap. If I can solve that problem th rest would actually be pretty simple.
You're sacrificing light for the wide angle. Increase the sensitivity to fix that and you're introducing noise. Extend the exposure time for each frame to reduce noise and you get motion blur. I know, it sucks. You can't win. Best of luck, my friend.
Exactly. I can get around some of this to some extent by sacrificing resolution for frame rate and just allowing distorting the image of it just letting showing things as they happen and that could address light sensitivity but that means sacrificing detail which could be important too. I dunno. I haven’t been able to solve this cheaply. There’s definitely off the shelf solutions to this but nothing at all affordable.
U use the cell phone...
The cell phone presents issues when used by itself. It can’t catch what actually happened and led to an event, so cops can lie. It only catches one angle, so it cant see everything. It requires you to directly handle it so it can be wrestled away and destroyed.
I mean I have a blackvue dual cam system setup going to a phone which is in a holder to act as driver view, all backed up to cloud.
I think the best solutions to problems like this take a sociotechnical approach. That is to say that in this case, I think that a crowd of people recording is more powerful than any app. I live in a country where police violence is less prevalent than in the US, and I have seen times when the police have tried to intimidate someone into stopping recording them. One of those times, it was successful, and the bystander got scared and stopped. Another of those times, someone who was better informed overheard the exchange and whipped out their camera too, and explained that the police had no grounds to ask that, especially given that we weren't interfering with their investigation of the original person.
It is unfortunate about the ACLU app though. Tech tools like that helped protect individuals who were trying to hold the police accountable, which is a useful step towards normalising a healthy suspicion of the police. I haven't read the above article yet, but I suspect the only reason why this footage wasn't destroyed or confiscated is because the cops didn't realise they were being recorded.
There are dash cams that upload to a cloud so destroying the camera doesn't destroy the footage as well.
That’s usually a paid subscription feature. People getting pulled over and beaten aren’t always the ones able to afford a subscription. It might be something a few can use.
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