New body cam rules in Washington, DC offer the public broad access to footage.
Yesterday, Washington D.C.’s Council approved new body-worn camera (BWC) rules that give the public broad access to body cam footage. The new rules will make police activities in D.C. more transparent than is the case in many other cities that are deploying similar cameras.
The Body-Worn Camera Program Amendment Act of 2015, originally introduced by Councilmember Kenyan R. McDuffie, is the result of eight months of work and deliberation between D.C.’s Council, local and national advocacy organizations, academics, government officials, and the public. The bill makes several important changes to existing body-worn camera policies in Washington, D.C.
First, the bill provides a clear way for members of the community to view the unredacted video of incidents in which they were involved. Specifically, individuals can “schedule a time … to view BWC recording at the police station in the police district where the incident occurred.”
Second, the bill creates a process for the public to request body-worn camera recordings made in public spaces, using Washington D.C.’s existing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and provides that footage will be released except when safety or privacy considerations require otherwise. As the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School recently wrote:
Body cam programs can only fulfill [the] promise [of limiting police abuse] … if the public has access to the footage. Without public access, police officers lose the incentive to improve their behavior, abuses remain unseen or contested, and, at worst, the footage turns into a tool of surveillance. With public access, on the other hand, observers can monitor police conduct, the media can serve as a watchdog, the public can encourage police departments to adopt reasonable policies regarding video footage retention, and the nation as a whole can identify and stop entrenched systems of misconduct or abuse.
The Body-Worn Camera Program Amendment Act of 2015 meets these needs. As the D.C. Council’s Committee on the Judiciary noted in a memo accompanying the bill, broad public access to recordings fulfills one of “the central goals” in rolling out the cameras in the first place — namely, “to provide transparency and improve police-community relations.” After a person makes a FOIA request, the MPD will have 25 days to either make the recording available or notify the person making the request why it hasn’t made the recording available. Just as important, the bill also exempts certain sensitive footage from public disclosure — for example, footage from a police investigation of sexual assault, domestic violence, stalking, or footage gathered inside a private residence.
Importantly, the final legislation differed in one key respect from the initial draft that the Council unanimously approved just two weeks ago. In its initial version, the bill required officers to file an initial report before viewing body cam footage. This would have been an important step to protect civil rights and preserve the evidentiary value of an officer’s recollections of events, and would fulfill the widely endorsed civil rights principles for body cameras that a coalition of leading organizations released earlier this year. Had the bill passed as it was initially drafted, D.C. would have become the first major city in the nation to require officers to write reports before viewing footage in all cases, as documented in a policy scorecard created by The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and Upturn earlier this year.
However, as WAMU’s Martin Austermuhle reports, on Tuesday, “in a last-minute change supported by a majority of the Council … police officers will [now] be allowed to view video to help them write incident reports, except in cases when they fire their service weapons.” Even after that change, D.C. still joins Baltimore, Oakland, and Parker, CO in carving out certain sensitive cases (in this case, officer-involved shootings) where officers will still be required to make a report before viewing footage.
Nevertheless, in allowing officers and potential complainants alike to view footage before making their written statements, D.C.’s new policy does much to level the playing field. As we’ve written before, if access to footage is allowed before statements are filed, such access must not be the special privilege solely of police officers. Simply put, if an officer is allowed to see the footage, the person filing a police complaint should be able to see that same footage too.
The law also contains other positive steps. For example, it prohibits officers from using their BWCs when at a school, limits use of BWCs during peaceful protests, and calls for the police department to audit how many FOIA requests they receive, the outcome of each request, and the cost of compliance.
With the law in place, D.C. can now begin outfitting more than 2,800 of its officers with body cameras.
