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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).


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