North Carolina AG says body camera law needs fixing

The law allows any person whose image or voice is captured in the recording, or his or her personal representative, to submit a written request for disclosure and, unless the agency can demonstrate a legitimate reason not to disclose the recording, it must be disclosed as promptly as possible.

The law, formally known as House Bill 972, is described as “an act to provide that body-worn camera and dashboard camera recordings are not public records” and legislation to provide “transparency between our law enforcement officers and citizens” by the North Carolina General Assembly.

The state has been attempting to spin the law as a good thing because it also prohibits the footage from being kept confidential in a police officer’s personnel file, and therefore completely hidden.

“We anticipate that at some point members of the press will take the new law out for a test drive to determine how well it’s going to work”, said Mark Prak, a lawyer for the North Carolina Press Association.

“It looks to me like it’s lot more hard with this legislation to make a video public”, Cooper said.

He added, however, that officials have learned that “if you immediately release a video, sometimes it distorts the entire picture, which is extremely unfair to our law enforcement officials“. Philando Castile, 32, was shot and killed by police in Falcon Heights, a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, the following day. It was news that shook communities.

Not only that, but North Carolina’s new secret police video law also established a “Blue Alert System” for police to call the police when they feel threatened, as if being the police and having police radios or calling 911 like the rest of us isn’t enough! “Sadly, our country and state have been through these types of situations before”.

He said during the signing ceremony that legislators wrestled with how technology “can help us and how can we work with it, so it doesn’t also work against our police officers and public safety officials”.

Pat McCrory signed the controversial police video release bill Monday (Courtesy of the Office of Gov. Pat McCrory).

Surrounded by law enforcement officers from several departments on Monday, he said he believed the law would strike a balance between “ensuring transparency” and respecting the rights of officers.

For McCrory, the goal appears to be simpler.

McCrory said rules surrounding access to the camera footage in the state were previously left to individual police departments and said that it was “better to have rules and guidelines rather than no rules and guidelines at all”, regarding the use of body camera technology. The officers were on duty at a Black Lives Matter demonstration. That number rose to 51 in 2014 and dropped to 41 in 2015.

“People who are the subject of body camera footage should be able to access that footage”, Susanna Birdsong, the Policy Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina, told ABC News. A requester can go to court if an agency denies the request. Body cameras may not be an ironclad solution to all of the problems in policing, but they are often seen as one marker of potential progress in the fight for transparency.

“We are equally concerned about the loss of dashcam [footage]”, Mike Meno, communications director for the ACLU of North Carolina, told The Huffington Post.