just the knowledge that cameras were disabled in that area would be as damning as any video.

I wish it worked that way. Logically yes, but not in court (as far as I'm aware). At least not when the offending officer is on the stand

only thing that they could do

Not true. Have you never heard of IMSI catchers?

Lol its not new. I once saw on reddit that apple filed a patent that allows concerts to emit a signal to prevent recording because... reasons...

Then people in the comments were like "Police could misuse this"

I mean I could see why the US couldn't do this. Constitution stuff and all, but just wonder why dictatorships don't just do it, they have all the power to.

Apple has a patent that is designed to allow concerts to disable iphone cameras to I assume "avoid distractions" or whatever. That could be exploited by the police. Luckily apple never implemented that in iOS.

So its not inpossible.

A government could mandate a manufacturer to install a backdoor that disables the camera to be used (or even disable communications if they wanted) that activates when nearby police send a certain signal, then the phone receiving the signal would disable whatever fuctions it wanted. This would allow them to just kill protesters then falsely claim that the protesters were rioting and using violence.

They may. I really don't know. We could go round and round about it, there are lots of arguments for both perspectives.

If a government does have this capability, they aren't likely to use it on a whim and have it be exposed.

How would that backdoor be activated?

See, phones could be preloaded with a malware that make it so that it doesn't actually turn off radios (like wifi bluetooth or celluar) when you change the settings, and only stops transmitting and goes to passive listening only. Once they detect a certain signal, like when police activates it in a protest, the phone then activates and disables recording, and maybe also disable trasmission of data.

I mean this is just hypothetical. I don't know if they are doing this, or if they can. But like when you think about it, its quite possible.

There are already reports of malware that fakes a shut down animation and silently records in the background, and execute remote commands.