ELI5, How does a police video become public? Are they required to make them public, or are they leaked?
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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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