College of William & Mary Law School William & Mary Law School Scholarship Repository Faculty Publications Faculty and Deans 2019 Policing the Admissibility of Body Camera Evidence Jeffrey Bellin William & Mary Law School,
[email protected] Shevarma Pemberton Repository Citation Bellin, Jeffrey and Pemberton, Shevarma, "Policing the Admissibility of Body Camera Evidence" (2019). Faculty Publications. 1904. https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/facpubs/1904 Copyright c 2019 by the authors. This article is brought to you by the William & Mary Law School Scholarship Repository. https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/facpubs ARTICLES POLICING THE ADMISSIBILITY OF BODY CAMERA EVIDENCE Jeffrey Bellin* & Shevarma Pemberton** Body cameras are sweeping the nation and becoming, along with the badge and gun, standard issue for police officers. These cameras are intended to ensure accountability for abusive police officers. But, if history is any guide, the videos they produce will more commonly be used to prosecute civilians than to document abuse. Further, knowing that the footage will be available as evidence, police officers have an incentive to narrate body camera videos with descriptive oral statements that support a later prosecution. Captured on an official record that exclusively documents the police officer’s perspective, these statements—for example, “he just threw something into the bushes” or “your breath smells of alcohol”—have the potential to be convincing evidence. Their admissibility is complicated, however, by conflicting currents in evidence law. Oral statements made by police officers during an arrest, chase, or other police-civilian interaction will typically constitute hearsay if offered as substantive evidence at a later proceeding. Yet the statements will readily qualify for admission under a variety of hearsay exceptions, including, most intriguingly, the little-used present sense impression exception.