ELI5, How does a police video become public? Are they required to make them public, or are they leaked?
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Laws vary by state and municipal regulations so there’s no hard answer to this.
Some jurisdictions do require police departments to make much of this information available upon request, some do not. Some may also require a court order or proof of legitimate interest – i.e. you can’t go around requesting the release of embarrassing police interaction videos of someone you just don’t like.
It would depend on the video and what it shows, along with local regulations on release of such video. Other considerations would be if the contents contain information about people that shouldn’t be released, if it’s part of an ongoing investigation, and other factors.
The upshot is there’s no single answer. Sometimes they can be leaked, yes. And some departments/states have policies requiring release of video, or response to public information requests, but all of that comes with the caveat of “it depends”.
(all of the above is written assuming that you’re asking about the United States)
Probably both. In US, police is heavily decentralized, every town makes their own rules, and makes their own decisions in regard to technology.
Sometimes police will release footage if it discourages crimes, or makes taxpayers feel good about use of their money.
I am sure hacks and leaks do happen occasionally, given that information security decisions are again made at the level of the city.
For the most part, at least in the US, they’re made public. Overall you have the Freedom of Information act which allows citizens to request documents, though this isn’t all encompassing if the government claims said documents need to be kept secret (current investigation, identities, whatever they want)
Some areas in the US are notorious for releasing lots of information as a rule. Florida became widely known in the US for it’s dumb criminals because they release information on every arrest. They didn’t have dumber criminals than everywhere else but theirs were reported on constantly because the information was always out there.
Similarly some police departments release body camera footage within a set time frame for any arrest. I think you can find a lot of these on youtube because people have found that they make for great schadenfreude.
Other times police release body camera footage in public announcements about investigations into use of force. So unlike the previous example you wouldn’t see their footage of random drunk people being idiots and instead only high profile cases.
While leaks always happen everywhere, so much footage is released as a rule that likely whatever you’re seeing is publicly available.
The vast majority of body camera videos are never released to the public or even viewed by another human. This is partially because most of them are uninteresting, but body camera footage can also invade the privacy of bystanders or be (potentially) involved in a criminal investigation. Many police departments have provisions that allow an involved citizen (usually the person accused of a crime documented in the video) to view a video but not to share it, but no police department routinely releases videos to the public.
When a body camera video is released to the public, one of three things happened:
-The police department released it voluntarily, usually after checking it for privacy violations or other concerns. This can happen with videos that cast the police in a good light.
-The police department was compelled by some policy or lawsuit to release the video. This tends to be the case for videos depicting serious incidents like police shootings.
-It was leaked. This is unlikely because body camera footage is pretty tightly controlled.
The end result is a very mixed depiction of police activity through video footage. It’s either rescuing cats from trees or shooting people, with no in-between.
In Florida we have the florida freedom of information act which is similar to the federal freedom of information act.
The Florida Sunshine Law gives citizens the right to access the public records of all state, county, and municipal governments and any other public or private organization operating on behalf of these agencies. That includes body worn cameras, phone recordings, memo’s, and all the good stuff. Anybody can request just about anything.
It is going to depend a lot on the state laws.
Every state has some form of open records law, often called “sunshine laws”. And the general idea is this: every single record or document generated or kept by government agencies should be available for anyone to review, unless there is a very good reason why it shouldn’t.
That last part is where the differences come in. There are some things that there is near universal agreement on what shouldn’t be available (like medical records, many records involving juveniles, individual tax records). And there are things that there’s near universal agreement on what should be available to review (government spending, votes by public boards and agencies, etc).
But then there’s the gray area where states can disagree. A common exception to disclosure is something that is part of an active police investigation. But those tend to have some very specific parameters, otherwise *everything* would be part of an investigation, and police activity would be practically unreviewable.
In some states, bodycam and dashcam footage is always accessible by the public. In some places, you have to have a judge agree that it’s OK to release it (default answer is no, judge can override that), and in others, the police can ask the judge to not release it (default answer is yes, judge can override that).
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