I suggest you read this Pro Public article published just last week which goes into great detail about how police departments around the country are obstructing release of body cam footage. Lawsuits by TikTok-ers notwithstanding. For example, from the article: https://www.propublica.org/article/how- ... dy-camerasJosh wrote: ↑Wed Dec 27, 2023 3:59 pmA FOIA request clears that up - or discovery in a lawsuit. There are a bunch of YouTubers, TikTokers, etc. who make a business out of this. They demand footage of police encounters and then post it on their channel and get lots of views. The police departments don't really like it, but there's nothing they can to do stop it.Ken wrote: ↑Wed Dec 27, 2023 3:49 pmThe problem is that a lot of police departments now don't release body cam footage or admit that they even have it. So relying on police to provide video documentation of interactions with the public may be less than ideal. Especially in cases where there is any question about police misconduct.
andFor a snapshot of disclosure practices across the country, we conducted a review of civilians killed by police officers in June 2022, roughly a decade after the first body cameras were rolled out. We counted 79 killings in which there was body-worn-camera footage. A year and a half later, the police have released footage in just 33 cases — or about 42%.
A Department of Justice report from this summer found that the secrecy and impunity was all part of a larger pattern in the Minneapolis Police Department. Shootings, beatings and other abuse had routinely been captured on video. But the department didn’t make the footage public or mete out punishment.
There was a similar dynamic in Memphis, Tennessee, where officers in a street-crimes unit regularly abused residents. They wore body cameras but faced no consequences until the case of Tyre Nichols, who was beaten to death this January by officers in the unit, attracted national attention. The footage showed that some of the officers took their cameras off. Others knew they were being recorded and pummeled Nichols anyway. It was only after public outcry that the department took the rare step of releasing footage, which contradicted initial police accounts and led to state and federal charges for five officers.
Some politicians have often quietly enabled obstacles to this kind of accountability. When South Carolina became the first state in the nation to require the use of cameras in 2015, Nikki Haley, the governor at the time, made the announcement with the family of Walter Scott standing behind her. Scott was a Black man who, two months earlier, was stopped by the police for a broken taillight and was shot in the back and killed when he tried to run away. A witness filmed the shooting, and that video contradicted official police accounts.
“This is going to make sure Walter Scott did not die without us realizing that we have a problem,” Haley said as she signed the legislation. What the governor didn’t say was that the same law stipulated that footage from cameras is “not a public record subject to disclosure,” thus relieving police departments from any obligation to release it. And indeed, little footage has ever become public in South Carolina.