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For police body-cam videos to do any good, they have to be seen by the public.
That much seems obvious from the many examples floating around the internet, and the results seen by police departments that have started using them.
But, as I’ve said before, there are plenty of issues lurking in the details.
Sen. Aaron Ford’s bill, SB111, mandating police officers in Nevada wear body cameras has created opportunities for law enforcement, press, civil libertarians and local governments to dig into the many issues surrounding the videos.
Proposed language for the bill states they are, in fact, public records.
But there are two exceptions that would make body-cam videos unique under Nevada’s public records statute:
1) They could be requested only on a ‘per event’ basis. No blanket requests for, say, all of the video shot by Officer Smith’s camera. Or every video of DUI arrests in March.
2) Videos that contain confidential or ‘sensitive’ information could be viewed but not copied.
I’ve agreed to both those concepts because I think they’re reasonable and represent a fair compromise.
Most important, they would retain the integrity of the state’s law on records by declaring everything is a public unless it is specifically exempted in statute.
However, it would create those two exemptions — no ‘blanket’ requests, and no copies of ‘sensitive’ video.
Of course, ‘sensitive’ is a vague term and would have to be defined. While we’re sitting around a table discussing legislation, it’s fairly well understood what people don’t want exploited on YouTube for purely prurient purposes.
But putting vague language in statute creates loopholes and arguments. Someone would try to take advantage of it to hide something that should be public. Still, under the proposed language, a reporter (and anyone else) could make a request to see the video.
What do they mean by ‘sensitive.’ Examples include juveniles, witnesses, bystanders who have nothing to do with the incident being recorded.
Body cameras, unlike dashboard cameras, can be worn into private residences. The ACLU rightly has privacy concerns about officers wandering around your home recording everything.
The ACLU also has justifiable concerns about police using body-cams for surveillance during protests or political gatherings. It’s pretty easy to imagine circumstances where that kind of video could be abused by people in authority.
The other exception — requests could be made only for individual events — is more a matter of practicality and expense. Seattle is often cited as an example where the police department was overwhelmed with requests for video, and where the department has started its own YouTube channel of fuzzy videos as a possible solution.
The cameras themselves are not the biggest problem at $200 to $600 apiece. It’s storing all that data, as well as having the personnel to review, catalogue and redact it.
When 500 Las Vegas Metro officers download hours of video every day into the system, that’s a lot of gigabytes.
Under Ford’s bill, all video would have to be retained at least 15 days. I pushed for that standard to be statewide, so everybody would know how long they have to flag a video for longer retention if they wanted it.
Other videos — anything that might help an investigation or be needed in court — would have to be kept much longer. Years, or in some cases virtually forever.
The routine, boring stuff can be deleted after 15 days. But somebody has to do that, and it can’t be the officers. Even when an officer marks a piece of video as insignificant — he accidentally activated the camera while he was eating lunch — somebody has to review it to make sure he’s not trying to delete the profane shouting match he just had while handing out a traffic ticket.
Another issue is redaction, a time-consuming process for which the technology — at least at the level of police video units — hasn’t quite been perfected.
It can all get rather messy and quite expensive. Even though the compromises in Ford’s bill seem reasonable, there will be many tests over the next two years to get some history of whether they actually work as intended.
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