FYI: You can record your police interactions on an iphone in a way that they will have a hard time turning off – as well as having the screen off

I just found out a neat trick that allows you to record video on iphone with the screen off, and that requires a special couple of keypresses to turn the recording off, meaning the cops will have trouble turning it off if they take your phone.

The likeliest use case I can see for this is if you are pulled over in a car, and you set your phone in the cupholder or something to record without police knowing, and also so that it doesn’t turn off if you put it in your pocket if they ask you to step out of the vehicle.

Anyways, here are the steps:

1. Enter the camera and set it to video. Configure other parameters to your requirements, like turning the camera to front or back.
2. Use Siri (by side button) to turn voice over on by saying “Voice over on” when Siri prompt appears.
3. Dismiss Siri (by side button), then double tap the record button to activate it.
4. Triple tap the screen with three fingers. This should turn the screen off. If it doesn’t, the device probably failed to identify the 3 fingers 3 times. Just try again. And don’t worry: The video is still recording.
5. When you’re done filming whatever you want, triple-tap the screen with three fingers again. This should bring the screen back on again. Again, it’s not hard to miss it. If it doesn’t work, try again.
6. Call Siri through the home button (or side button, for newer devices with no home button) and tell it to “Voice over off”.

Boom. Brilliant. Going to be using this going forward to record any interactions with police, even if not in my car.

There might be a way to set this up to do it quicker using shortcuts but I haven’t looked into that at all, let me know if that’s the case.

edit: also, in the event that police DO are in fact able to stop your video and delete it, you can go into your photos app and scroll down until you see the “recently deleted” folder, which I believe can only be opened with face ID.

Also also, you can prevent your phone from being opened by face ID alone by locking, and then pressing down-volume and lock button to bring up “shut down” slider. Just dismiss it, and your phone now requires passcode.