I'm not sure what the duration answer is, hence the guesses as examples. I don't think it should be indefinite either. Again, the problem we're solving is providing evidence of what occurred at a specific incident, not retroactively creating a Truman Show out of the lives of any involved police.
IMHO, working in law enforcement requires you give up some of your privacy rights in exchange for a local monopoly on the use of force. It shouldn't mean you lose all of them permanently.
> Additionally, unless there was some guaranteed way to permanently prevent the destruction of video marked “of interest”, the video could be destroyed simply through delaying tactics by the force under investigation.
That's why I specifically call out having an entirely separate entity control the storage and dissemination. The video can't be public by default for a host of reasons (for starters, the privacy of both the police and non-police that are recorded) but it also shouldn't be able to be held hostage by the law enforcement bodies that may be held accountable by it.
I don't understand this objection. Police officers are generally presumed to be honest by jurors. If there is evidence that this presumption is unreasonable, then it is definitely relevant.
Do you expect every recording, video, audio, and statement made by a police officer involved in a case, at any point in his service, and unrelated to the crime at hand, to be provided to the defense?
Going through someone's history to find dirt is the definition of a fishing expedition. With enough footage, speech, and actions, you could find incriminating evidence on anybody.
If there's accusations that a police officer is dishonest, lying under oath, planting evidence, or really anything else illegal, then internal affairs should be investigating them. They'd require a warrant just like anybody else to get access to the historical records (and I think they should get it). But not just any random person that wants to dig dirt on Officer Joe because he busted him for public urination.
Unfortunately it's wishful thinking / cipherpunk porn to imagine a world where that actually happens.
In reality the videos would probably be stored in plaintext, there wouldn't be viable/tested backups of them, there would be no log of who has access to them (the log would exist but it wouldn't log actual access), an insane number of contractors working for the department of justice would have access to all the videos (though most wouldn't realize it) rather than it being on a need to know basis, and just about every other infosec / PII issue you can imagine would apply as well.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing
Presumably argued as concern for the privacy of the police themselves. I can imagine the police unions fighting tooth and nail to maintain the right to decide when cameras are recording because otherwise there is going to be a lot of crap like this for them to deal with.
Personally, I think they should always be on, always be recording both audio and video, and continuously uploading the footage to servers controlled by a third party agency that is not in the direct or indirect control of the local police or district attorney's office. Footage would be archived for a preset amount of time (1 year? 5 years?) and then destroyed (by deleting the crypto key that's used to encrypt it). During the "active" window either the prosecutor or the defendant could request access to any or all footage of the police around the timeline of an incident.
Outside of that, it should require a warrant to view the footage. The goal isn't to turn this into a fishing expedition to turn over prior dirt on the police that apprehended you. An investigation like that by internal affairs would require a warrant as well.