For a while, the rules governing how this would work — how police departments would build policies to let the public view videos and feel comfortable about having a bunch of cops act as roving surveillance cameras — were written by local legislators governing cities. There were good policies and bad, with some cities making it easier than others for civilians to obtain police video. (The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the tech policy group Upturn created a helpful policy scorecard to track which cities were doing what.) But as more police departments spent millions of dollars on body cameras and video storage, police unions, district attorney associations, and other law enforcement lobbying groups began to push for statewide laws restricting transparency. North Carolina, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Kansas, among others, have now instituted counter-transparency body camera laws. Even Missouri — home of Ferguson — classified body camera footage as a “closed record.” If another shooting like the one in Ferguson occurred, and the shooting officer was wearing a body camera, it’s almost certain the footage would be withheld from the public until after a trial.
Other states are now also looking to make body cam video extremely difficult to obtain.
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It’s nice that body cameras have given police the opportunity to show the public when officers act heroically, but that’s not their core function. Their core function is to monitor police activity, and to provide public documentation when it’s needed. If that documentation shows police in a positive light, that’s wonderful — let it be known. But police departments shouldn’t be able to push out positive footage while burying the negative. As much as police might like to think otherwise, there are plenty of “bad apples” working inside the nation’s 18,000-plus police departments. Body camera footage should help to remove some of them from the bunch.
