One is a random guy recording the cops then being able to cut it and edit it how he pleases to spread any info they want. Other is full recording of what happened from the officer's point of view.
Ironically, the security cameras on people's private property that cops are choosing to put tape over before possibly committing crimes are closer to "full recordings" than what body cameras offer.
Body cameras are sold with features that cops and their bosses like, like features that exist for the purpose of keeping the public from accusing cops of violating their rights or worse.
That means that many body cameras are designed to only record short 30 to 60 second segments of video after a cop feels that "something bad" might happen to them. Many of the cameras also come with convenient on and off switches, too, and some come with features that allow cops to delete videos.
Taking an egregious example of the murder of George Floyd, there is no context that could have preceded the footage of his murder that would have justified kneeling on a man's neck for over 9 minutes. It also would have been trivial to detect if someone had extended the video to make it appear that he knelt longer than he did.
What are some examples of situations where you imagine that footage taken by a regular citizen could be edited to make an officer's reasonable actions look like police brutality or other major forms of police misconduct?
OBVIOUSLY if police officer is committing a CRIME the footage of that crime is evidence enough, but I've seen many times cut up security footage of "cops harassing someone" only to see the full footage of the "someone" in question being the aggressor the whole time and then yelling about police brutality when he is apprehended and escorted into the police van.
We've witnessed this US LARP in my country just recently where protestors were nicely carried into police vans by the cops, but some intentionally went completely limb to hinder the operation and footage of these limb people getting dragged into the van was used as evidence of how brutal our police force is even though there was dozens of removals where people were carried without even touching the ground.
