Albuquerque police have issues.

The most famous recording of Albuquerque police in action shows them shooting and killing a homeless man — a shooting that began as a normal rousting for the crime of “illegal camping.” From there, the police turned it into a “standoff” with a cooperative person unsure of which direction to move next out of the very justifiable fear of being shot.

This was just another in a long line of killings by APD officers, not many of which were captured on video. The DOJ issued a report stating that a “majority” of shootings by the city’s police officers were “unreasonable and violated the Fourth Amendment.”

Ain’t that DoJ great, reporting that the shoots are bad? It’s a shame they’re never around before the cops wrongfully kill people, dealing with the known problem until after the blood is cleaned up, but hey, who doesn’t love a report afterward confirming what everybody knew? Yay, feds! But I digress.

The police department does have a variety of cameras in its possession, which should have generated a wealth of footage for examination by public records requesters, attorneys, and police supervisors — just in case they wanted to get a handle on the PD’s problematic deadly force usage. The Albuquerque Police Department has shot more citizens than the NYPD since 2010, despite policing a city sixteen times smaller.

Remember when body cams were controversial? Remember when they were going to save us from all the abuse, misconduct, violence and death? They would be the magic bullet. So why hasn’t it stopped the ABQ cops?  Why is there no “wealth of footage” revealing the awfulness of the Albuquerque police?

Three officers’ body camera videos that captured events surrounding the fatal shooting of 19-year-old suspected car thief Mary Hawkes in April 2014 were either altered or partially deleted, according to former APD employee Reynaldo Chavez’s nine-page affidavit.

Good video? It’s a keeper. Not so good? What video?

Also alleged is that surveillance camera video from a salon showing APD officers shooting Jeremy Robertson, a law enforcement informant and suspected probation violator, in June 2014 bore “the tell-tale signs that it has been altered and images that had been captured are now deleted. One of the deleted images captured the officers shooting Jeremy Robertson.”

Chavez also said that ‘SD cards’ from cameras were easy to make disappear, and that he witnessed Assistant Chief Robert Huntsman say ‘we can make this disappear’ when discussing a particular police camera with an SD card in it, according to the affidavit. SD cards are memory cards used in portable devices, including cameras.

Technology is grand, right?

Chavez goes on in the sworn testimony to say officers in multiple APD divisions, including those involved in police shootings and those assigned to specialized units, were instructed to not write reports until a review of their videos. If the videos had no images considered harmful to the department, the officers were permitted to write in their reports that “they had recorded a given incident.” But if images deemed “problematic” for the department were found, officers were instructed not to mention a recording in the report or to write “the recording equipment had malfunctioned” or the officer had failed to turn it on.

When officers already had written reports that described recordings, “the video would be altered or corrupted if it was damaging to the police department.”

Of course, none of this was supposed to be possible. Certainly it’s criminal to destroy evidence, and it would be terribly wrong for the police to engage in criminal conduct to conceal their criminal conduct. Oh wait.

In the early days of body cams, when the concerns were police adoption of the technology, these problems were raised, debated and, to the extent possible, “solved” in the sense that it was understood that policies, practices, presumptions and tech would need to address the gaping holes in what began as such a simple solution. A great deal of time and thought went into how to make this work, how to make sure it wasn’t subject to tampering, to deletion, to being “disappeared” when the video showed the cops doing the dirty, like killing someone without lawful justification.

Good times, right?

APD shelved most of the Scorpion cameras in 2013 in favor of newer models manufactured by Taser International, Inc. With the Taser cameras came a five-year subscription to the company’s cloud-based storage system, Evidence.com.

Evidence.com allowed Chavez and a handful of others at APD to “edit lapel camera video in any number of ways,” according to the affidavit, including by “inserting or blurring images on the videos or by removing images from the video.”

“I was able to see, via the Evidence.com audit trail, that people had in fact deleted and/or altered lapel camera video,” he says in his affidavit. Furthermore, Chavez says that APD employees uploaded video from other sources, such as cellphones and surveillance cameras, to Evidence.com and altered those as well.

For all the discussion focused on the sanctity of video evidence, everybody forgot about the issues when the next shiny cop issue arose that distracted us. In the meantime, Taser went into the police body cam business and came up with a system ripe for abuse. And nobody noticed.

Remember all those great reforms President Obama and Attorney General Holder announced? The ones that never actually happened? Remember how they stopped giving police departments military equipment until they didn’t? Remember how they were going to fix bail so kids didn’t spend years in jail, in solitary confinement, awaiting dismissal of their cases, where they still languish today? Remember how the feds were going to stop using private prisons, while they renewed their contract?

At least we have technology to save us from all the evils that must come to an end.