> If you look at their Youtube channel [1] pretty much every OIS and LERI video does have body cam and/or dashcam footage.

Am I reading this wrong or is this a very biased sample? Of course videos are more likely to have video.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but "critical incident videos" have a 1:1 relationship with critical incidents, not with body cam videos. Every critical incident has a video. Even if there's no body cam video of the actual shooting, police are still obligated to produce a video containing 911 calls, radio calls, body cams from responding officers, etc.

I do not know of a "critical incident" that doesn't have a corresponding video (except for deaths in prisons and negligent discharges that don't result in injury). If there's no actual media to go with it, they'll still show a talking head reading a statement listing off the address and police version of the narrative (you can see examples if you look at LASD, since they've halfassed their body cam deployment). I'm curious to hear if you know of any exceptions (excluding events within the last 45 days or so, before the deadline).

LAPD releases a list of all of the critical incidents and the videos, so should be easy to cross reference and see if anything is missing.

In video footage that shows a lot of other officers, you can see if they're wearing BWCs. When there's an Officer Involved Shooting, all cops in the area are going to rush to the spot (as the shooting officer should have been in danger), so you should be able to see a lot of officers wearing BWCs.

I don't know if LAPD releases much of that BWC footage in unedited form, but where I live (Chicago), a civilian oversight board reviews use-of-force incidents and makes BWC footage and other materials public [0], and in my experience as a homicide researcher for UChicago, officers were initially skeptical of BWCs, but now they consider them a valuable piece of personal protective equipment, as they are often exonerated by their BWC footage.

[0] https://www.chicagocopa.org/data-cases/case-portal/

"Look all the videos they posted are, in fact, videos!"

Doesn't say a lick about what they omitted from YouTube.

being good at using bodycams is damning if there is no footage.

I don't follow, or maybe I was unclear. I think LAPD is good about following their body cam policy in situations where they're required to use body cams (like when driving around town). Even in cases where the video makes LAPD look criminally bad (like the situation a year or two ago where a cop beat someone up in Boyle Heights for calling him names), the video doesn't "go missing" or "experience file corruption" or anything like that.

However that doesn't imply anything about situations where they aren't required to use body cams.

If i am a cop going to commit murder, i'm going to turn my body cam off.

If my body cam is off, this is one of the possible explanations.

If there are fewer other explanations for my body cam being off, then it is more likely that it was because i was committing murder than in the other case

Probably every law enforcement agency in a first-world nation looks good if you compare it to the LA County Sheriff's Department, seemingly best known for their gangs, my own crowning memories being the deputy assigned to my high school selling drugs to students and my dad once getting cited for parking more than 18 inches from the curb at the end of a cul-de-sac at which our house was the only one, so the only traffic we could have conceivably impeded was ourselves.