This was a voluntary program though. Blocking the police from asking for help is unnecessarily adversarial. You are right about police collecting video from Ring without user involvement, but this was transparent and voluntary.
It isn't like they were pulling videos without consent to send tickets for rolling stops. Although if they did, they could collect enough revenue to fix every road in the country. :lol
A good lawyer got the case dropped pretty quick, but not before she spent a weekend in jail, got fired as a teacher, and spent thousands on legal fees. The police had “video evidence” and therefore refused to drop the case even when the ex retracted the claims, and required months of fighting the legal system.
Beyond that awful freak incident, there’s tons of cases of police planting evidence, police ignoring real evidence, and police using an individual’s voluntary will to help them catch one crime to implicate an innocent person in a petty crime unexpectedly. There’d have to be a pretty big crime for me to voluntarily show the police any video of myself.
That's setting aside that this was also all about interior cameras, which are really a different subject from the exterior cameras. There are much stronger arguments for public requests for external camera feeds than interior ones.
"Which do you want for dinner, broken glass or razor blades?"
> True, but nothing about this stops someone from having their own cameras and selecting for themselves.
A lack of a time machine does; the post upthread says "after they broke up". You won't be able to go back in time and install a second set of cameras to provide the cops with the full context.
I feel like my point wasn't clear. Nothing about Ring's decision here stops the bad one from doing what they did in your scenario. If the bad person controlled the cameras (and it sounds like they did), they'd still do the same thing regardless of this policy.