For those of you that have ever watched the television show COPS (and who hasn’t?), many segments of that show include in-car police video footage. COPS is a show that first aired in 1989 and is still running to this day!

Camcorders that used magnetic tape were standard up until the mid-to-late 2000s before the storage medium changed to Flash or DVD-based, and the tape of choice was the Hi8, a Sony format. It had good quality, the cartridges where physically much smaller than VHS and was the second-most rugged compared to ENG-grade Sony Betacam SP (not to be confused with the consumer-grade Betamax format, although the cartridges were the same size).

On many episodes of COPS, the in-car footage seen in many instances was most likely recorded by a Sony HandyCam camcorder heavily modified for police cruiser use. Several functions were disabled purposely and a large steel box with a key was attached to the base containing a circuit board. This board was what controlled the disabled functions outside of it. The key was there so that the officer could not purposely disable the camcorder.

A third-party company, International Police Technologies, is one such outfit that does the camcorder modifications. This is typical because companies who manufacture camcorders do not offer any "police packages".

Today, most in-car police camcorders use either Flash-based media or DVD-RAM, an optical format where the disc is mounted inside a cartridge.

See video below to check out how a police-modified HandyCam works.

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