My point isn't that this is a good thing. It's that this confiscation doesn't come close to proving that they committed a criminal homicide, because they routinely confiscate phones for other wrong-headed reasons, too, which they then return, after a cooling-off period, to convince the amateur videographer that it's not worth the inconvenience to film them going about their business.
My point is this story isn't just about the beating. That's bad enough if true, but that has to be worked out. The other part of this story is completely independent of whether that guy deserved to be beaten to death, and that is the issue of the police confiscating the phones.
This has been a nationwide issue for a while. It's not just a matter of phones being taken and returned later either. People have been arrested and prosecuted for simply taping the police.
The police do not have the right to confiscate your video phone because you recorded them, whether it was a beating or a traffic stop or just hanging out at the donut shop. They do this because they don't want to be accountable. Don't let them get away with it.