Peter Moskos, a criminologist who spent a year on the Baltimore police force while doing his PhD, has a good post up about what happened -- http://www.copinthehood.com/2017/07/thats-quite-days-work.ht... It seems like the officer forgot to turn on his body camera while originally finding the drugs, and so rather than get reprimanded for forgetting to turn on the camera, he decided to recreate the crime scene and pretend he had that he had the camera on the whole time.
But these cameras have a 30 second buffer, and are always recording to that buffer. The buffer is stored when the start button is pressed. That is how he got caught.
So if your camera is off, and you found a stash of drugs. Just press the start button. It'll record you finding the stash 30 seconds earlier.
That's actually why that button exists. So officers have a recording when it's needed unexpectedly.
Agreed it's a theory, though someone mentions some other site with more on the story in the comments..
However, not to excuse falsifying evidence, the 30s buffer example you mention wouldn't cover the case where you found the stash more than 30s earlier and have already disturbed with the otherwise valid crime scene..
I'd imagine in some sort of hot pursuit situation it would be pretty easy to do this and forget the button, especially if you've been working for years without them..
>It seems like the officer forgot to turn on his body camera while originally finding the drugs
FTA: "So maybe this was a reenactment based on a true story. This scenario, which is where I would place my money ..."
It's just a guess. And I'm not entirely convinced by the argument that (also FTA) "people in Baltimore City don't get prosecuted for a stash of drugs"; because right in the first paragraph, he says "A man was arrested related to this ... he had been in jail for the past 7 months." In other words, even if the police knew they weren't going to get a prosecution, they could have just wanted to punish this guy, or try and get him to "confess", or who knows what.
And this is why we'll never have meaningful police accountability and reform. Even being caught in the act, on video, of planting evidence someone will create an excuse for why what they did wasn't wrong. Sickening.
He has a post about what he thinks happened. His take on the issue is extremely (and unreasonably) charitable, but it still involves manufacturing evidence.
