Police officers in the state of Washington have been using body cams for awhile-- now many municipalities are planning to stop using the cams; because: the state's Public Records Law.
Another case of unintended consequences.
Washington's Public Records Law means anyone in the state can demand a copy of police body cam footage.
They’re blaming the state’s 42-year-old public-records law, which requires government agencies to release—at nominal charge—almost all records that aren’t tied to active investigations and imposes stiff fines for not responding promptly to requests. Police departments say complying with demands for body camera footage presents a huge burden, because many videos must be blurred or muted before they can be released to protect the privacy of people caught on camera. Alan Townsend, the chief of police in Poulsbo, across the Puget Sound from Seattle, says it could take his department three years to respond to a request to release about 1,000 videos.
The state’s law doesn’t require people making requests to identify themselves. Results can be sent to an e-mail address or cloud storage service such as Dropbox. Since September, an activist in Seattle, using the e-mail address ----, has used the law to make anonymous requests for body and dashboard camera video footage from police departments around the state. He posts the results to a YouTube (GOOG) channel. The man, who has declined to identify himself, says he’s simply advocating openness in government. “I just thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if the public had access to the videos?’ ” he said after being reached via his Twitter (TWTR) account.
His campaign briefly threatened to derail Seattle Police Department plans to add body cameras to its existing dashboard program. Seattle’s force has been subject to monitoring by the U.S. Department of Justice since 2012, after a federal investigation found the city’s officers routinely engaged in excessive use of force.
I strongly support the use of body cams by police officers-- however, there are already documented cases of the cops turning their cameras OFF. and now this problem which I can easily see some municipalities making the case that release of body cam footage to the public presents an
undue financial burden to them-- and they will bring litigation to stop sharing/transparency efforts by the public. This will end up going to the SCOTUS.
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