I understand the privacy side of things, but I'm suspicious of the motive. We've seen with police body cameras that the cops are quick to release exonerating ones, but "we don't release evidence during a pending investigation, but trust us, the video is exonerating" in cases where the footage is damning.
Police have massive short term gains from going against the rules. It makes their jobs easier (short term), safer (short term), more apparently successful (short term). Plus plenty of law enforcement exclusive privileges ready for abuse. Taken together this creates a massive demand for oversight and accountability, and big incentives to undermine those.
None of this exists in the field of EMTs. When they "hide behind data protection", it would be to protect against frivolous litigation after honest mistakes, which I find not only understandable but also preferable. If I ever need one of them, I'll surely want them to give their best medically rather than spending cycles on court-proofing their process.
Assuming that's true, couldn't that maybe be because exonerating evidence precludes the need for a pending investigation, whereas unclear or damning evidence requires further investigation to build a proper case before the whole thing goes to trial?
Our legal system is intentionally biased towards "innocent until proven guilty", so it generally makes sense to not release evidence of criminal activity prior to the case being brought to trial. The same obviously doesn't apply to evidence of innocence, especially if that evidence is strong enough that it likely means the case will never make it to trial in the first place.
> However, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, CPD officials explained that the lack of audio is due to the fact that the “sound doesn’t turn on until 30 seconds after the recording button is activated.” Chicago’s local ABC affiliate also similarly reported, “The body cam video that was released does not have audio as there is a 30-second delay when the officer turns the device on.” This is simply not true.
The "not tainting an ongoing investigation" excuse is particularly silly as in many cases the potential perpetrator is specifically granted access to the footage:
> A new report by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and Upturn Research to be released Tuesday shows that the vast majority of the nation's largest police departments allow officers to view the footage before writing a police report or being questioned by investigators during use-of-force cases. The group believes that policy undermines police credibility and runs the risk of influencing how the officer describes what happened.
The first article explains that the footage was not edited; the audio data simply wasn't being recorded until after the officer pressed the record button (the first 30 seconds were from a buffer with no audio).
And no, it's not a silly excuse. Just because current policy in some departments allows one potential witness's testimony (the officer's) to be tainted for procedural reasons (ensuring accuracy of the police report), doesn't mean we need to risk the same thing happening with _all_ witnesses. That's a ridiculous argument.
