You should need a pyshical bodycam or phone out in order to record a situation within roleplay and use said recording in roleplay.
Be careful what groundrules you establish, with this...
You may find, for example, that your own 'third-person' game-recording no longer becomes acceptable in-game as a roleplay element, and instead, that you are required to have first-person footage, deemed to be from your bodycam, as evidence. It cuts both ways...
Alternatively, you may see a situation where, if a situation cannot be viably roleplayed, using the game-screen recordings as some element of evidence, then the resolutions will cease to take place in RP... and will instead end up being handled on the forums or by staff as 'rulebreaches' rather than RP-able situations. This will doubtless result in some people being banned, rather than retrained or reined in, in the game.
IMHO we have to accept that in the context of a video-game where it is much harder than IRL to get recordings of things 'first person' or on phone cameras, etc, we need to incorporate some aspects of game-screen footage as 'roleplayable'. Ultimately it will come down to the courts to decide what is fair and what isn't, case by case.
What I do not want to see is a situation where the civilian (and that includes gang) population is somehow magically 'not allowed' to use the same facilities that the cops use, in order to prove a case of, for example, cop wrongdoing. Unlike IRL, people who have been run over by over-zealous cops using their vehicles as weapons against pedestrians, do not have wounds, broken legs, smashed pelvises, etc, to be able to provide as evidence in a court case or police complaint. They don't have torn clothing with cop BMW sump oil stains all over it. They don't necessarily have the testimony of 'locals' who would IRL most likely have stepped up to report their observations at the time (for good or bad).
The civilian terminology of referring to game-screen video as 'bodycam' makes me cringe as much as it does you, I'm sure... but the point is, it's a misnomer. Really, it's 'witness evidence' - it's a meta for the information gathered by locals, CCTV in the street, other people's phones as well as the player/character, and so on. It's **not** a bodycam, and it isn't a Go-Pro, per se, unless they actually have one - and I agree that it would be nice for those props to be included in the game **in the situations where we are referring to it as such**. But the game-screen video will always be here, and can (and should) still be used where necessary, for roleplay and for rulebreach detection. This will not change.
And as regards the point where a player doesn't offer up game-screen video that incriminates themselves, of course not! What do you expect? In this situation, unfortunately for the cops (but fortunately for the perp), there are clearly no witnesses coming forward, or there was no CCTV available - at least, none that the cops could lay hands on. Again, this cuts both ways. The player (as 'film director') gets to decide what bits of game footage to place 'into evidence in RP', and they cannot and should not be required to incriminate themselves in situations where cops don't have enough evidence to make a case. That goes for police too **unless they are under standing orders from their Command, to supply their bodycam footage at all times** - but if that is a requirement placed on cops, by their superiors, then that is the price of being a cop, and being tasked to uphold the law. There should be nothing on those cop bodycams/witness-CCTV-videos to incriminate the cops, after all, unless they are bent coppers.
