Cops delete incriminating surveillance video, say they have no idea who deleted the video

[DetlefK]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/laquan-mcdonald-burger-king-video_5655c5abe4b072e9d1c1469b?xd730udi

On Tuesday evening, more than a year after Laquan McDonald's death, Chicago police released dashcam video showing officer Jason Van Dyke killing the black 17-year-old in a hail of 16 bullets.

...

Officers had pursued McDonald through the parking lot of Darshane's Burger King on the night of Oct. 20 to investigate reports that the teen had been breaking into trucks.

According to Darshane, that location is equipped with surveillance cameras that would have likely recorded parts of the brief pursuit, though not the actual shooting itself. In May, however, he told NBC Chicago that police had deleted the footage before he got a chance to see it.

On the night of the shooting, a handful of officers came to the restaurant and asked to view the recordings, Darshane said. Employees gave them the password to the equipment, and three hours later, the officers left, he said.

When an investigator for Chicago's Independent Police Review Authority showed up the next day asking for the same thing, the IPRA investigator found that nearly an hour and a half of footage recorded around the time of McDonald's death had gone missing.

"We had no idea they were going to sit there and delete files," Darshane told NBC Chicago. "I mean, we were just trying to help the police officers."

...

"The fact that the police entered the Burger King restaurant without a warrant or a subpoena, accessed the system upon demanding the password, and then left and that 86 minutes or so of video is missing from all 11 cameras is something that gave us a great deal of concern,"

...

"The Burger King cameras had seven different video files. The officer went into the Burger King, and he erased all seven of those files," Futterman said. "The irony is, though, that the Burger King surveillance video was running while the officer erased them. And so there's a videotape of the officer erasing the video."

Authorities have made no attempt to explain what happened to the video, and neither the Chicago Police Department nor the IPRA responded to The Huffington Post's request for comment. So far, however, officials have maintained that disappearance of the footage had nothing to do with the police.

[Kber]

1. Irony

"The irony is, though, that the Burger King surveillance video was running while the officer erased them. And so there's a videotape of the officer erasing the video."

If true this is big

[safeinOhio]

2. Who's going to arrest me, I'm a cop.

My ex, a cop, often told me those exact words.

[mountain grammy]

6. Yep, heard it said many times,

by cops.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

3. There's video of the cop erasing the tapes? That's hilarious.

Quick! Send in another cop to erase the tape of the cop erasing the tapes! And then another to erase the new tape of that cop erasing the prior cop's erasure! And then...

[daleanime]

5. ........

[Rose Siding]

4. So they're totally busted but maintain that they aren't.

What next? We just hope for further court intervention? It already appears the killer wouldn't have even charged without a judge ruling that the video proving the murder be released.

I eagerly await further developments!

[mike45567]

7. The big lie that enables the police state

A year ago we heard this:
“What happened in Ferguson may not be unique, but it’s no longer endemic or sanctioned by law and custom, and before the civil rights movement, it most surely was.”
It is exactly wrong. It refers to the root problem. A law created this problem. It was designed to allow the continued expulsion, enslavement and murder of black and brown skinned people. It still functions aa designed. We have lost most of our personal freedoms due to this law. Our government has been corrupted, prisons growing like tumors. Cops are death squads.
And the man who made the ridiculous statements above, one year ago, giggled when asked about this law. His blind spot on cannabis is an ongoing national tragedy.

[SmittynMo]

8. Analyze this.

Most recording videos are digital. Tape is hardly ever used.

Ever heard of checking the trash bin? LOL. And even if the trash bin was emptied, and the ACTUAL tracks on the recording device have not been written over, the file is still there. It's called forensics.

[DetlefK]

9. Maybe forensics experts of the police should look for traces of those files on the hard-drive.

But seriously, I guess lots of the files are routinely deleted and written over after some time unless they are explicitly preserved.