Professor Imwinkelried Comments on Police Body Camera Technology for Reveal News

Professor Emeritus Edward Imwinkelried commented for Reveal News, a publication of the Center for Investigative Reporting, on legal issues associated with the use of body cameras and other technology used to document police work. 

Recent high-profile cases of alleged police brutality have resulted in a call for police to use technology to document their encounters with the public, and the Obama administration has announced a plan to provide funds to purchase body cameras for law enforcement officers nationwide.  Professor Imwinkelried said that the use of such technologies raises issues as to how to store securely and share impartially the data, which would be transmitted to private companies for cloud storage.  Such data would be subject to the same restrictions and protections as other evidence, Professor Imwinkelried said.

"Police departments will have to dot their I's and cross their T's to document their evidence collection and gathering procedures in the cloud and ensure a timely response," Imwinkelried said. "These cases require careful tracing of the chain of custody in civil matters, and the problems on the criminal side with cloud storage will mirror this."

"The more data you get, the more police departments face the same problems as private corporations - they don't have the in-house capacity. But the duties of evidence preservation are nondelegable," Imwinkelried said.

Professor Imwinkelried is a world-renowned evidence scholar and has published extensively in the field.

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