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92 Ind. L.J. 1329 (2016-2017)
Collateral Visibility: A Socio-Legal Study of Police Body-Camera Adoption, Privacy, and Public Disclosure in Washington State

handle is hein.journals/indana92 and id is 1381 raw text is: Collateral Visibility: A Socio-Legal Study of Police Body-Camera Adoption, Privacy, and Public Disclosure in Washington State* BRYCE CLAYTON NEWELL Law enforcement use ofbody-worn cameras has become a subject ofsignificant pub- lic and scholarly debate in recent years. This Article presents findings from a study of the legal and social implications of body-worn camera adoption by two police departments in Washington State. In particular, this study focuses on the public disclosure of body-worn camera footage under Washington State's public records act, state privacy law, and original empirical findings related to officer attitudes about-and perceptions of-the impact of these laws on their work, their own per- sonal privacy, and the privacy ofthe citizens they serve. The law in Washington State requires law enforcement agencies to disclose substantial amounts of body-camera footage-although important new exemptions were added to state law in 2016-and options for withholding footage based on privacy grounds are limited under the state's Public Records Act and disclosure-friendly decisions of the Washington State Supreme Court. Additionally, broad requests for body-worn camera footage have posed significant problems for civilian privacy. Police officers report strong con- cerns about public disclosure of their footage, largely because of the potential for such footage to impact civilian privacy interests, and officers also report high levels of disagreement with laws requiring the disclosure of most footage to any member of the public. However, officers are supportive of limited access policies that would allow individuals connected to an incident to obtain footage. This Article concludes by making a normative argument for restricting public access to some body-worn camera footage on privacy grounds while still preserving adequate space for robust civilian oversight and police accountability. * Copyright C 2017 Bryce Clayton Newell. ? Assistant Professor, School of Information Science, University of Kentucky; Ph.D. (Information Science), University of Washington; J.D., University of California, Davis School of Law. The author wishes to thank Mike Katell and Chris Heaney for their assistance with fieldwork and data collection, as well as Adam D. Moore, Ryan Calo, Ricardo Gomez, Batya Friedman, Steve Herbert, Mary Perry, Marthinus Koen, Maartje Niezen, Ivan Skorvinek, Bart van der Sloot, Maurice Schellekens, Linnet Taylor, Nadya Purtova, Dmitry Trubnikov, Claudia Quelle, Silvia de Conca, and Tim Clemans for comments on previous versions and drafts of this paper; all of the individuals who consented to participate in the empirical research described herein; and all those who facilitated access to (and within) both of the police departments studied, especially Chief Clifford Cook (Bellingham Police Department) and Chief Frank Straub (Spokane Police Department; chief until 2015) and their respective command staffs who graciously allowed access to their departments. Portions of this research were funded by the University of Washington (Information School) and under a grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) (project number 453-14-004). 1329

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