An anonymous activist is prompting police departments in Washington state to reassess decisions to have police officers wear body cameras, a move usually designed to increase the transparency of officer interactions with the public.
The activist, who says he’s from the Seattle area, in September began making blanket requests for 911 call recordings and body camera video collected by police departments under the state’s extremely liberal public-records law, which doesn’t require people making such requests to identify themselves. The man, who’s sometimes referred to as “the Requester,” has posted 91 videos to a YouTube (GOOG) channel called Police Video Requests, including footage of officers chasing a man on foot as he claims he’s being harassed; handcuffing a motorist, realizing it was a misunderstanding, and then apologizing; giving CPR; and shooting a man with a Taser gun without obvious cause.
Under Washington’s law, police departments are required to release pretty much any public record that isn’t tied to an active investigation. People making the requests don’t have to say why they want the records or what they plan to do with them, or even give their names; the state will deliver results electronically to anonymous e-mail addresses or cloud-storage services like Dropbox. Police say complying with blanket requests for body camera footage presents a huge burden, because many videos must be selectively blurred or muted to protect sensitive information before they can be released to the public. Police officials in Poulsbo, a small town near Seattle, told local news site Crosscut.com the task is so time-consuming that it would take three years to satisfy a request the department recently received for all of its footage.
Bremerton, another city in the area, recently shelved its plan to use body cameras, to avoid a similar hassle. “In a perverse way this is driving us the opposite direction of where we should be,” Steve Strachan, Bremerton’s police chief, told KOMO, the local ABC (DIS) affiliate. Seattle is kicking off a limited pilot program for body cameras and is watching the situation as it determines whether to outfit all of its officers by 2016.
In a phone interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, the Requester refuses to identify himself but says he’s a computer programmer in his 20s. He says his actions are a form of political advocacy for openness in government: “I just thought, Wouldn’t it be cool if the public had access to the videos.” He thinks all the video should be made public as a way to keep police departments accountable.
The Requester has also experimented with ways to make money from his project. For some videos, his YouTube page shows a clip, then prompts a user to click through to fuller versions that include advertisements. He says he’s decided to stop trying to profit from his effort. “I started to go down the monetization standpoint, but then I thought it’s not even worth it. It degrades my credibility.” As of midday Thursday, the ads were still on his YouTube channel.
He also sent a message via Twitter (TWTR) to Taser International (TASR), the company that makes the body cameras, on Nov. 12, bragging that his campaign was costing the company money:
The Requester says he wants Taser to post a selection of videos regularly to a public-facing page on its Evidence.com website or set up a system where police departments would give defendants an identification number for the website, which they could use to access any video relevant to their case. Rick Smith, company’s chief executive, says it is still considering how to respond. “It will definitely not be to ‘negotiate’ with someone like this,” he says. “This guy’s actions will be a centerpiece of our legislative efforts together with law enforcement showing how the current records law is open to abuse.”
Jared Friend, the director of technology and liberty at the ACLU’s Washington State branch, says the situation has exposed conflicts between the simultaneous need for transparency and privacy. The solution, he says, is new rules that limit the footage police departments retain to incidents where they may be disputes or allegations of wrongdoing. The organization is withholding support for Seattle’s camera program until data retention practices are cleared up. “It’s a really difficult set of tensions and it’s one we thought a lot about here,” he says. “The ACLU doesn’t believe the solution is to limit the right of the public to make broad records requests.”
