The Sandra Bland dashcam footage was not edited. There are some loops, but that’s common with raw dashcam footage. I’ve uploaded a video using footage from my own dashcam to show it happening.
First, a disclaimer: I haven’t studied every frame of the Sandra Bland dashcam footage. I watched it through and was horrified at the way she was treated.
Earlier today, the raw footage was pulled from YouTube, likely because people are claiming it shows clumsy signs of editing, at around 25 minutes, and again at 32 minutes, and perhaps elsewhere. Even NBC is running a story on it. But those loops are not a sign of editing. They actually suggest that it wasn’t edited. It’s just a side effect of how many dashcams work. Anybody used to working with video cameras might be surprised at the differences.
Dashcams record continuously, but they have limited storage space. They can’t write one very long, ever-increasing movie file. Instead, they record file after file, then erase the oldest files to make space. My own dashcam, a G1W, is set to record in three minute chunks. Others might use seven minutes or fifteen minutes, or perhaps base it on file size instead of the time.
You might expect a dashcam to stop recording one file before starting the next. But the housekeeping steps -- close one file, create a new file, open it for writing to it -- take time. Maybe a fraction of a second, but still, time. That would introduce a gap between two segments. Chances are, you wouldn’t care. But imagine how you’d feel if you were in an accident and the critical moments had fallen into the cracks between two video segments.
So instead, the dashcam starts recording the new file before closing out the old. That introduces a redundancy of frames, a sort of looping glitch. That’s not a sign of editing, but a sign of raw dashcam footage.
I’ve uploaded a video from my own dashcam. Other than the text overlays, it hasn’t been edited. It’s from two 3-minute segments, and if you look closely at the 3 minute mark, you’ll see a looping glitch. On my dashcam, it’s subtle, but it’s there. The dashcam footage of the arrest of Sandra Bland has a greater redundancy, a longer loop, but it’s why at 25 minutes and again at 32 minutes you see the video stutter. No frames are missing; there’s just a second or so that gets repeated.
This is also why, in the raw video published by the Texas Department of Public Safety, the audio ended before the video. I don’t know how the audio was recorded, processed, or posted, but it shows no sign of stuttering or looping. Instead, it loses sync as each stitch between video segments adds time to the video portion.
Sadly, the Texas Department of Public Safety has responded to the media questions about editing by removing the raw footage from YouTube, and replacing it with video that has clearly been edited. I wish they’d let us see both.
We need to move forward with investigating what really happened to Sandra Bland. Unfortunately, the investigation is being sidetracked by well-intentioned people who suspect the dashcam footage was edited.
If there is other evidence that the video was edited, I’d like to see it. But the two examples that have been bandied about are nothing more than what you’d expect from raw dashcam footage.
