Not really any context here, but I'm imagining one of the following scenarios:
The woman was recording because she had something to do with what was going on.
The woman was recording because she thought what was going on was just interesting.
The woman doesn't like police and was trying to catch them doing something she can report or take to the media.
The woman stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to browse pictures of cats on reddit while holding her up her phone and while she was distracted a bunch of officers started doing stuff in front of her.
Of the possible scenarios, I'm guessing it's number 3. If you are going to record police because you want to have evidence in case they do something illegal, a smart person would do it from a distance. If you think that police are capable of being power abusing assholes, why would you get that close to them? Because you want to get up in their shit and you think they can't/won't do anything to stop you because you will have evidence.
Now I'm not trying to say people shouldn't be recording police, but please try to be smarter about it. It is perfectly possible to record police without pissing them off. Should a pissed off police officer be allowed to destroy evidence/property/faith in the system? Fuck no, but guess what police are fallible because police are people. I'm not going to argue that what Baldy McShades did makes all cops look like total dipwad counterstrike server admins, but I would argue that this woman is basically doing the equivalent of when a bully walks up to within an inch of your face with their chest bulging out just daring you to do something.