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Body Camera Legislation in North Carolina Seen as Blow to Transparency

The new piece of state legislation rules that footage from body-worn and dashboard cameras will not be a part of the public record, and any release must be ordered by a superior court judge.

(TNS) -- Legislation passed this week in the General Assembly appears to keep the public from having access to police body camera footage.

“It makes it extremely unlikely that the public will see body-worn camera footage and dash camera footage of questionable or controversial police activities,” said Mike Rich, associate professor of law at the Elon University School of Law.

House Bill 972 determined that effective Oct. 1, law enforcement recordings, including body-worn and patrol dashboard cameras, are not public records. Further, it prevents police from releasing any such videos to the general public without the law enforcement agency seeking and receiving an order to do so from a superior court judge.

“I think that we ought to be able to release some videos,” said Chief Jeffrey Smythe of the Burlington Police Department. “This gives me no leeway to manage public perception, and that’s probably not a good thing. So I’m a little disappointed that that avenue isn’t there, except by court order.”

As the law reads, besides law enforcement and district attorneys’ offices, the only people permitted to view footage from body-worn cameras are those whose “image or voice is in the recording.”

Police can still deny the release of the footage to someone seen or heard in it, in which case that individual himself could petition the court to view the video.

Though Smythe expressed concern about a lack of discretion for law enforcement officials to decide when footage should legitimately be released to the general public, he said parts of the legislation resolved some of the Burlington Police Department’s concerns about how much time officers would spend sorting through video for public records requests as well as concerns about the privacy of citizens shown in the videos.

“I have a mixed feeling about it,” he said. “It’s so difficult, because the motto for my police agency is ‘trust through transparency.’ In appropriate circumstances, I very much want to make things available to public review and scrutiny and make your own best judgement about the professionalism of my agency, and this law doesn’t allow me to do that.

“At the same time, I think it has some very stringent safeguards that are well-placed.”

For example, Smythe said, the law now doesn’t allow nosy neighbors to request and receive footage from when officers went inside a nearby house on a disturbance call.

In light of the new law, Smythe said Burlington would have to make some revisions to its body camera policy, which “was written under a much looser set of guidelines.”

Chief Cliff Parker of the Elon Police Department, the other Alamance County-based law enforcement agency using body cameras, said his department was previously planning on releasing footage upon request unless it pertained to a “personnel issue or a criminal investigation,” though starting in October, he’ll have to obtain a court order to do that for media and the general public.

“This is going to be tough when the press has no access to it,” Parker said.

Like Smythe, Parker also sees positives to the law.

“One of the big benefits is that at least there’s some kind of consistency throughout the state,” Parker said of all the law enforcement agencies’ policies on releasing footage.

Law enforcement agencies throughout the nation have cited transparency and public accountability among the reasons to invest in body-worn cameras for officers.

After HB 972 was passed in both the House and Senate on Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina released a statement in opposition to the law.

“This bill is an affront to transparency and we are urging Governor (Pat) McCrory to veto it,” said Susanna Birdsong, policy counsel for the ACLU of North Carolina. “Giving law enforcement such broad authority to keep video footage secret — even from individuals who are filmed — will damage law enforcement’s ability to build trust with the public and destroy any potential this technology had to make officers more accountable to the communities they serve.”

Though police through a court order could potentially release footage surrounding a controversial event, Rich indicated that it appears to be entirely up to law enforcement to petition the court to do so, and not something that media or a member of the public could do if a police department declined to cooperate.

“I don’t see a way that a representative of the public or the press could go to court under this provision and seek access,” Rich said.

©2016 Times-News (Burlington, N.C.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.