>I don't have direct experience, but I'd bet Taser doesn't let podunk police departments really "erase" video.

The NYTimes article you posted hints at an uncomfortably cozy relationship between Taser, law enforcement and local governments...

    Yet as Taser works to sell cameras and software to more departments, 
    it is coming under fire for questionable business practices. In some
    instances, it has paid police chiefs to travel to Taser conferences. 

    In other cases, chiefs who have bought Taser products have joined 
    the company as consultants shortly after leaving public service. 
    And several cities have awarded contracts to Taser without 
    competitive bidding.

I wouldn't trust Taser to act as faithful or impartial stewards of this data, when it's in their best business interest to maintain a positive relationship with the very entities whose corruption it exists to expose.

Taser also operates a legal-defense-aid operation for police officers who use Tasers to break the law.

I'm gonna need a source for that.

Oh, don't think I'm suggesting they're impartial stewards. But they should have some incentive not to be the co-defendant in every police assault case where the video goes missing.

It is probably easy for a records clerk to export redacted video, but should be hard for them to really delete video, or tamper without leaving a trail.

Some customers might justify the risk, I suppose. But if they were to regularly winkwink at cops deleting video evidence, they'd get walloped.

> I don't have direct experience, but I'd bet Taser doesn't let podunk police departments really "erase" video.

They will if they want to keep getting contracts.

Maybe once. But if that's a repeating problem that the legal system can't solve, it'd be a symptom of something so fundamentally broken it really makes police behaviour the least of our problems.