I nearly went in to law enforcement, and the arguments made by police and prosecutors in this article sound like bullshit to me. The strongest arguments, in my

I nearly went in to law enforcement, and the arguments made by police and prosecutors in this article sound like bullshit to me. The strongest arguments, in my opinion are the lack of a chain of custody, and privacy for third-parties. Chain of custody simply means knowing who had control over a piece of evidence and when. It comes in to play when someone in a trial claims that a piece of evidence does not match reality and may have been tampered with. In a criminal trial, deciding the credibility of evidence is generally a matter for the jury. In a non-criminal complaint about an officer, it's a matter for the officer's supervisor. In no case that I am aware of is it illegal to collect evidence because the chain of custody may be difficult or impossible to determine. Privacy for third parties is a bit more tricky. I think it might be a good idea to have some restrictions on distributing videos of police encounters with other people without permission from those people (but not the on-duty police officers involved) or obscuring their identities. Many states already have rules against recording conversations without permission, and an exemption for recording police officers wouldn't necessarily apply to recording interactions between a police officer and a third party, so this may be a non-issue in certain debates.