What Happens When You Run Forensic Analysis on Provincetown Police Body Camera Files
I filed public records requests with the Provincetown Police Department for body camera footage. They produced 8 MP4 files. I ran them through ExifTool — a standard forensic metadata tool — and here’s what I found.
Every single file had its internal timestamp fields zeroed out. Not one or two fields — 80 metadata fields across 8 files, all showing 0000:00:00 00:00:00. No creation date, no device identifier, no officer ID, no original filename, no recording information. Nothing.
Body cameras automatically embed this data at the time of recording. It doesn’t just disappear.
Provincetown PD also provided CSV files and called them “metadata.” They’re not. They’re system export logs — completely separate from the native metadata embedded inside video files. Producing export logs does not authenticate the underlying video.
When I raised the issue, Provincetown redelivered the same stripped files multiple times. The department uses Motorola CommandCentral — an integrated evidence management platform — but its sharing links produced 0-byte downloads. Literally empty files.
The Massachusetts Supervisor of Records has since issued multiple determinations directing Provincetown PD to comply. The department’s own Records Clerk admitted in writing that multiple officers had active body cameras during incidents but only one officer’s footage per incident was produced. That’s a written concession that additional footage exists and was withheld — not an exemption under Massachusetts public records law.
Provincetown is a small town on Cape Cod with a year-round population under 3,000. It operates the same CommandCentral platform used by major departments across the country. The infrastructure to preserve evidence integrity already exists. The question is why every file produced from that system arrives with its metadata completely gutted.
If you ever receive body camera footage through a public records request — from Provincetown or anywhere else — run ExifTool on it before you do anything else. The metadata will tell you whether you received an original recording or something that’s been processed, stripped, and repackaged.