House Bill 972 does make such video accessible to people who can be seen or heard in it, along with their personal representatives ― but they must file a request to obtain the footage. If the request is denied, the petitioners must go before the state’s superior court. Requests can be denied to protect a person’s safety or reputation, or if the recording is part of an active investigation.
Current state law establishes that dashcam footage is in the public record, and it doesn’t address body camera footage. But police departments usually consider body camera footage to be part of an officer’s personnel file and thus private. The new law will make body camera footage accessible under the same stringent new conditions that dashcam footage will be.
So, you have to request the footage (Acceptable IMO), but they can choose to deny the request based on safety (okay), reputation (troubling and confusing. I see no reason to protect someone's reputation from themselves. Blur a public version if needed), or if it's part of an investigation (makes sense to me). Making sure departments don't use a loophole to keep officer camera data hidden is a plus.
The only case that comes to mind with regard to safety is if officers enter my residence illegally (e.g. by accident) and catch me in a compromised position. If you couldn't legally be in my house anyway, you sure as hell better not release footage of me to the public while you were there.
As soon as there's a single subjective criteria by which footage can be denied, virtually all footage will be, period, the end. The "reputation" and "active investigation" parts make any concessions to the public completely and utterly worthless.
This part seems curious to me. Isn't that exactly when a person "who can be seen or heard in it, along with their personal representatives" (e.g. accused person and lawyer) would need access to such footage? Perhaps there is some nuance here about what constitutes an active investigation?
If there's an actual arrest and trial, the Supreme Court case of Brady v. Maryland (1963) requires that the state hand over any exculpatory evidence [1]. The state has to go out of its way to hand over evidence -- even if the defendant doesn't know it exists.
[1] "Exculpatory" = "might show that you are innocent." There's a long line of cases that define how broad that definition is.
* I am not your lawyer. Go get a criminal defense lawyer.
If you release someone being arrested, and afterwards it is a case of mistaken identity or one is found not guilty, it can affect reputation. Arrest records are public, and even when it winds up being mistaken identity or a not guilty verdict, it impacts lives and jobs. Some folks would base their judgement on how you acted or where you were in that video.
In addition to things such as domestic violence (perhaps we should blur out faces of the victims, for example, and not show their naked bodies to the public).
On the other hand, some of these could damage the Officer's reputation, and I wonder if they could be denied for that reason.
Sounds like the exact point to me, block camera footage that shows crimes of officers.
What's really needed though is a way to escrow the footage. This is a solved problem in the tech world. The stream should be stored off site, cryptographically signed (public sig), in the control of a third party (though still a government entity, not a private corporation). Otherwise you'd be asking the criminals[1] to hold onto the evidence.
[1]: Not that all or even most police are criminals, but in the case where a police officer does commit a crime they are de facto criminals.
Have the keys be a subkey of a DA, Judge or other high ranking individual. Then when the police 'lose' the key, the video can still be recovered.
We expect folks in call centers to take all sorts of abuse. Folks working at the local pharmacy are supposed to keep a smiling face and professional demeanor, even if folks are yelling obscenities and insults in their direction. Folks tell retail workers that if they can't do that, or if they can't handle that, or don't like it, they need to find another job.
I don't see why we shouldn't expect that from police in most situations. I understand the need to be firm at times with some folks, but it isn't something that needs to be done at a traffic stop. Even if the person being pulled over is grouchy. Works both ways.
And yes, some folks will be harassed for their behavior, but I think it'll be a minimum.
It's hard to contort the First Amendment in such a way not to protect this.
I agree that this is one of the core rights of information age society.
(I'm pro-recording here btw.)
I may be wrong but wouldn't this make the footage exempt from FOIA? (Unless the people involved filed the FOIA request ...)
The history is complex, but basically, the Democrats controlled NC state politics for decades (weird, I know) and lost both the governorship and the legislature in the wake of backlash from Obama carrying NC in his first term. Big-money Republicans poured money into the state to ensure that a) Obama didn't carry NC in 2008 and b) Republicans would control the state during the key years following the US census, during time which they would gerrymander the ever living fuck out of our districts. Expect to hear lots of stories about our state's laws getting slammed by SCOTUS. There are several cases already in flight.
Don't try to make sense of it all -- it's about power and pandering and the worst most regressive parts of "conservatism".
Police are employed by the public. That footage, taken by public employees, in (mostly) public spaces, ought to belong to the public. I'm very concerned about privacy, the police / surveillance state, but I'd rather strap cameras to all officers than continue to allow them to literally get away with murder.
The downside, of course, is transparency at a time when public trust in police and proper oversight is at an all-time low. And the "oversight" piece of this is critical. We simply don't believe answers like, "Our internal investigation shows that the officer acted correctly."
So I do think this is the right move, but this needs to be coupled with real reform in independent police oversight and investigation.
So long as the video is available for related court cases, now and in the future, that's fine. There does need to be a way to safe-guard it from destruction when someone wants to hide something, but I think that's a different matter than making the videos non-public.
