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