Dash / in-car cameras

In September 2026 a federal jury in Texas ruled for Alek Schott, who sued Bexar County and its sheriff over a 2022 traffic stop that began with automated license plate reader data. The jury awarded $76, one dollar for each minute he was detained. Schott was stopped in March 2022 driving home from Carrizo Springs; a deputy later admitted the stated reason, lane drifting, was bogus, and Schott’s dashcam showed no drifting. The tip came through a law enforcement WhatsApp group from someone called Kiki with access to license plate reader data, citing Schott’s one-day turnaround. A drug dog alerted and the truck was searched; nothing was found. The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office touts its use of Flock Safety cameras.

On August 4, 2026, Lawyers for Civil Rights filed a lawsuit in Suffolk Superior Court against the Boston Police Department and the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office. The suit seeks the release of body-camera and dashboard-camera footage from a fatal police shooting in Roxbury on March 11. Both agencies denied public records requests, citing an investigatory exemption. The lawsuit argues this exemption does not outweigh the public interest in the footage. It asks the court to order release and award attorney’s fees.

An internal Bridgeton Police Department operations report dated May 2, 2024, documented the loss of approximately 62,000 body-worn camera and in-car video files. The report attributes the loss to a hard drive problem on the department’s WatchGuard server after a botched migration to a new system that went online in July 2022. The department contacted Motorola and Equus for recovery, but neither could provide the missing files. New Jersey law requires retention of body camera footage for at least 180 days, and longer in certain cases. The report does not indicate whether prosecutors or defense attorneys were notified of the loss.

Albany County, Wyoming, reached a $1.2 million settlement with the family of Robbie Ramirez, who was fatally shot by Deputy Derek Colling in November 2018. The settlement, dated May 2, 2022, came amid allegations that body and dash camera footage was tampered with. Original videos were deleted by a sheriff’s lieutenant in December 2019, violating a five-year records-retention policy. As part of the settlement, a judge issued an order stating there was no legal basis for evidence tampering.

In a § 1983 excessive force lawsuit by Dustin Woods against officer Jason Scissons, the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona ruled that the City of Prescott failed to preserve dashboard camera footage from the incident. The court found that dash cams in at least two police vehicles would have recorded relevant footage and that the city had a duty to preserve it. It imputed the spoliation to Scissons and allowed a jury instruction that if the jury finds the city destroyed the footage with intent to deprive Woods of its use, it may infer the footage was unfavorable to the city.