Audio of 911 calls…police body cam footage…police interview footage…crime scene photos…what, do filmmakers just call up the cops and say “Hey, I’m making a documentary” and the cops are like “sure thing, here’s all this stuff”?
I guess I don’t understand what’s in it for the cops to share. And is none of this stuff considered private?
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>Audio of 911 calls…police body cam footage…police interview footage…crime scene photos…what, do filmmakers just call up the cops and say “Hey, I’m making a documentary” and the cops are like “sure thing, here’s all this stuff”?
Exactly like this yes. Because most of that stuff was already submitted at evidence in trial. And once it has been it’s now public record. And yeah you can totally just…go up and ask for copies of material in the public record. You totally get to do that.
A lot of that stuff is already part of the public record because of the court cases. In some cases Freedom of Information requests may have been submitted in order to obtain the records. It varies from place to place and some may have less strict privacy legislation that permits those records to be used for true crime documentaries, etc.
You don’t even have to say you’re making a documentary. You fill out a form, pay the fee, and they hand it over. Anyone can request and obtain any public information. Sometimes certain records are sealed by a judge for one reason or another, but most records are available.
Public records requests, FOIA, etc. You’d be surprised the kind of data that is accessible.
All the stuff on YT is released quite fast and people make successful businesses out of free information all the time now.
All of that tends to be public record, and you can also put in requests (Freedom of Information?) and they can be given out.
Hell, if you’re pulled over you can even request the bodycam footage from the local pd if you were curious.
If the case has already gone to court, which is the norm for documentaries, it’s all public record and anyone can access it.
If it hasn’t gone to court yet, like a lot of the raw bodycam footage you can find on YouTube, it’s usually obtained by filling out a Freedom of Information Act request with the department in question. One popular bodycam page on YouTube features mostly videos from Wisconsin. I suspect the operator of that page is from Wisconsin and just FOIAs shit he here’s about on the scanner/news/local paper etc and posts the good stuff
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