As I reported yesterday:
There’s a bill on the move in the state legislature that, if passed, would make it harder for you to obtain police department body camera videos. Some Seattle legislators, worried about what this bill will mean for transparency at the SPD, want to amend the measure so it doesn’t apply to Seattle. But Seattle’s mayor, Ed Murray, is lobbying against those amendments.
Some readers were confused about the bill—HB 1917, sponsored by Representative Drew Hansen (D-Poulsbo)—and whether it would really be so bad if, supposing Mayor Murray gets his way, the unamended bill gets approved and governs how the Seattle Police Department, like other police departments across the state, will handle body cameras.
This explanation of why the ACLU of Washington opposes the bill, from Jared Friend, the group’s technology and liberty director, might help clear things up:
We do want the legislature to regulate the use of police body cameras, but we don’t believe Hansen’s bill does so in an effective manner.
1. Any body cam legislation should include requirements to ensure that body cameras are used properly by law enforcement. There should be robust guidelines regarding when the cameras should be turned on so that we can be sure that vital interactions with the public are recorded and there should be limitations on use of collected footage for surveillance purposes. Hansen’s bill does not address either of these key concerns.
2. The public should be able to get access to this footage for purposes of investigating police misconduct. There should not be onerous requirements such as court orders to do so. An early version of Hansen’s bill was very restrictive in this regard, but recent amendments he has proposed scale this back. However, Hansen’s current bill limits the recovery of fees for requesters where disclosure has been wrongfully withheld, this is a serious problem that undercuts the value of our public records act.
3. There should be privacy protections that protect the public, but don’t undercut the transparency aims of the cameras. This is a very difficult balance to strike, one that we worked hard on for the 1910 bill that we previously supported. The original version of Hansen’s bill went way too far towards the privacy end of the spectrum, making it nearly impossible to get videos, while the recent version does little to nothing to protect against release of sensitive video footage to the public. These cameras are different from dash cams and traditional public records, because they ultimately amount to thousands of roaming surveillance cameras that will roam our streets and homes and capture all kinds of sensitive interactions. We need to proceed cautiously to ensure that our privacy is protected.
All that said, Hansen’s bill does one key thing. It creates a task force made up of a diverse set of stakeholders to look at this issue more carefully. This could help the stage for a more nuanced result next year. From our perspective, the rest of the bill should be eliminated, and those provisions passed.
The Washington Coalition for Open Government takes a similar position.
“It seems bizarre that SPD has done so much work with transparency activist Tim Clemans to automate the publishing of blurred police video, if the Mayor would prefer to see people charged a fee for obtaining it,” Seattle Privacy Coalition president Jan Bultmann tells me in an e-mail message. “I have to confess that I don’t really understand what’s going on here.”