In a great ruling about the use and misuse of police dash cam video, a state of California appellate ruling just made such videos available as public record!
The City of Eureka with their usual blockheaded lummoxing screwed the pooch by overexposing this effort by California police agencies to keep police videos out of the public eye.
This small very liberal weekly paper has worked hard at such issues always, and this one should be appreciated by everyone.
This is a developing issue, especially since car video, but especially now that officers are wearing these cameras and many more such video is there to be seen….or hidden.
The City of Eureka tried to argue this specious business however they could...in this case they tried to argue that the video was part of personnel records, and as such the judge said, Nope!...Too Far.
It should be expected that this will be appealed to the Supreme Court in CA..and we will see.
The case was one where a controversial EPD officer was subsequently entangled and fired/settled and is now not in the EPD...so there was a serious personal records issue, yet the judge ruled the expectation of privacy didn’t exist for him and the city...deliciously ironic in a way, as we have seen the ‘expectation of privacy’ issue erode so much of our expectations of life currently in so many ways.
Writer Thadeus Greenson wrote a great article about it, he was the one who filed the case originally, and big congratulations for the continuing efforts of the Humboldt County’s North Coast Journal for their old school persistence and attention to people’s rights , especially in their interactions with police.
Falllout from this may well appear soon in the civil suit against the city and EPD, that of a police shooting of a young man in his own front yard, EPD claiming he had a gun!!..a bb gun.
This case, in a long line of such cases, was especially damaging to people/police relations here in Eureka. Currently there is of course a civil case going on, I don’t know anything current about it.(Tommy McClain was the young man, RIP.)
EPD has refused to expose that video , still, I am pretty sure...(without checking I may be wrong about that, so..)
Yay for the North Coast Journal for doing this, the rights of citizens and transparency in their dealings with police just has taken a step for the better.
I am guessing that Greenson and atty Boylan is right, that agencies up and down the state have been very guilty of mission creep in the way they have grasped far and wide to not have to provide dash cam or by extension officer camera videos.
Will other agencies somehow parachute into this?.....stay tuned.
Here’s what the NCJ’s attorney said of his victory:
Reached this afternoon, Boylan said he’s grateful the court issued a published ruling in the case.
“This is a big deal,” Boylan said. “This appellate opinion will now provide guidance up and down the state.”
Boylan said there is a trend throughout the state of agencies extending the statutory protections granted to police officer personnel records — known collectively as Pitchess — to records that don’t warrant them under the letter of the law. “Ultimately, this entire case turned on a simple principle: That Pitchess is designed to protect privacy but this couldn’t be private because it happened out in the open,” Boylan said.
The Davis attorney said he was drawn to the case because he believes “democracy is strengthened by transparency” and he was “offended” by the city’s invoking Pitchess to try to prevent release of the video.
Read more here:
Arrest Video Can't be Kept Confidential, Appellate Court Rules