Last month the CPD [Chicago Police Department] found that 80 percent
of its 850 dash cams do not record audio, and 12 percent don’t record
video either.
The CPD has blamed the failures on "operator error or in
some cases intentional destruction," and a close reading of that review
by DNAinfo Chicago
reveals the extent of the latter. Officers frequently tampered with
dash cams, stashing microphones in their glove boxes or pulling out
batteries. Some dash cams were found with their antennae deliberately
destroyed, and others had had their microphones removed altogether.DNAinfo also describes a months-long repair time for dash cams that experienced “intentional destruction.” For example: Jason Van Dyke, the officer who shot and killed McDonald and has been charged with first-degree murder, brought in his dash cam in early 2014 to have a wiring problem fixed, and got it back three months later, on June 17. The very next day, the dash cam was broken again. This time it took until October 8 to fix what appeared to be intentional damage. Less than two weeks later, his dash-cam footage of the McDonald shooting (which differs from the viral video we all saw) had no sound. Police records show that the microphones in his car had never been synced up to the camera.
More information at NY Magazine,
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