imported post
Heck, I took my recorder out and started it recording and played with it, fingering it back and forth in my hands as I was recording a conversation that I then used to force an issue with the local PD.
There was another time that I used the TP7 and the recorder to record a phone conversation that got a civil charge against me dropped completely!
A video recorder was useful to me when dealing with renters/tenants ... one idjit claimed that I stole items from him when he left town on the weekend he was supposed to be moving ... when I got ahold of him, he gave me permission to move his stuff to the new apartment (they were 1 room efficiencies, so there wasn't much). Anyway, I filmed the apartment when we went in, I filmed the load in the back of my pickup truck, and I filmed it in the new place ... when he made the accusation, I took the recording to the PD and the detective copied what I had and told the yahoo to find someone else to blame for loosing his property.
Then, I had another tenant claim that I stole jewelry from her when she got thrown in jail, but I had video where the best friend asked me to go in and remove the dog so it wouldn't go to the animal control shelter. A different detective tried to make a case about it, but I told him, why would I want her cheap crap, here's the video that shows what I took, which was the dog to keep such a great animal from having to go to the animal shelter, which ment they would have lost the dog. Instead, I provided food and shelter for the dog with someone the dog knew and liked. Then, there was something about a laptop that the best friend brought to me because she realized that it might be considered stolen as they hadn't been paying the rental fee on it ... I called the rental (Colortyme) and turned it in to them and got a receipt from them with the date and time on it (so that shut the detective down for a minute). Then the detective tried to say that I had received stolen property ... yeah, right, I was an officer of the court at the time, and he could not lay that charge to me. I asked him how it got from me stealing her property by returning it to the rental agency that had not been paid in over 6 months, to me receiving stolen property when I returned it to the rental agency as an officer of the courts?
That jackass detective has plenty of problems of his own ... some personal and some job-related.
Like has been said, you never know when you are going to capture something that is important. You also need to know the laws of your state governing recording and the types you can do as a private citizen (different from reporters and news agencies.)
One good one that happened in my state about 10 years ago was when a man was beaten very badly in the county jail. The deputies denied they did it, but one night at a Dennys, they were talking about it. The folks in the next booth realized what they were talking about and one guy took his phone and folded it up in a newspaper and put it on the back of the booth like he was just trying to get it out of the way. Well, he got quite a bit of incrimintating evidence on his phone recorder. The officers got up and left and one of them saw the guy get the phone out of the paper and tried to intimidate him into giving up the phone. The guys called the Highway Patrol for assistance and the officer who responded is the one that told me this story. He escorted the guy out to his vehicle, and told him to get the recording to his lawyer as soon as possible.
Three Deputy Sheriffs lost their jobs and the Sheriff lost his next election. And the victim got a 6 figure payday from the county.
All because someone caught it on a recorder and knew what he was getting.
It is almost imperative today to have your own recording device to protect yourself from false accusations.
