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I'm not sure I fully understand the issue. Don't police body cameras serve most of their purpose if they are available as evidence in legal cases? As far as I k
by baddox 7y ago
I'm not sure I fully understand the issue. Don't police body cameras serve most of their purpose if they are available as evidence in legal cases? As far as I know, the evidence in evidence rooms is not by default available to the public, though it may end up being disclosed as part of a legal case.
If the problem is that prosecutors are protecting police unfairly, then publishing body camera footage isn't really going to help unless it's enough to cause significant public outcry. After all, there are plenty of instances of publicly available videos of police doing things where the public doesn't believe the legal repercussions are sufficient, and there is public outrage, and it doesn't matter.
- Retric 7y agoThe issue is freedom of information act requests where disclosing this information in mass outside of court cases.
- baddox 7y agoRight, I'm asking why all body camera footage would be subject to such requests, or why the requests wouldn't be subject to significant redaction for obvious reasons. I am all for police transparency, but I don't see much function in having all body camera footage public as long as the footage is easily obtainable for any legal case.
- Retric 7y agoThey defaulted to bing public. Government workers needed to follow the law, and there was no blanket exception given for this kind of footage, thus the issue. By comparison 911 calls are public in many areas, so they likely made an accurate legal assessment.
- closeparen 7y agoOpen records principles accommodate time delay much more often than they accommodate total opacity. You can probably FOIA the police files on old cases, including details of the evidence.