State law enforcement struggling with deluge of body cam data, seeks change in law

With almost every peace officer wearing a body camera, plus squad car dash cameras capturing video, do you ever wonder what happens to the hours upon hours of video recorded?

When nothing eventful happens, the answer is simply storing video files on an agency’s servers and making the footage available upon request, such as by public defenders.

In the case of an officer-involved shooting, there can be multiple terabytes of data, which, by law, must be made public on the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s website within 30 days.

That’s an extremely onerous task, says Rep. Kelly Moller (DFL-Shoreview). She sponsors HF1354 that would limit the posting requirement to just video that captures a deadly encounter.

“There are a lot of body cam videos these days, and a lot of them are things that aren’t as relevant to the incident,” she said. “Those other things would still be available; they just don’t need to be posted to the website.”

The House Judiciary Finance and Civil Law Committee approved the bill, as amended, Tuesday and sent it to the House Public Safety Finance and Policy Committee.

BCA Superintendent Drew Evans said his agency supports public transparency and the public’s right to know the facts surrounding an officer-involved death, but, he too, believes the vast majority of video captured is “extraneous” to the core of these tragic events.

Evans has nine full-time staffers reviewing body and squad car camera video to redact any private data captured. For example, he said blurring the faces of uninvolved bystanders is a tedious and extremely time-consuming process that must be done by hand.

“That is just taking an extreme amount of time for us to do and we’re not meeting that 30-day [deadline],” Evans said.

Nothing in the bill would change state law specifying the rights of the public to view video files from police cameras by making individual data requests.

“This proposal is meant to enable the BCA to improve efficiencies to meet the statutory deadlines and provide access to the relevant data in a timelier manner while maintaining processes to enable access to the full data set as needed,” the BCA stated in written testimony.