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Police Department Charging TV News Network $36,000 For Body Cam Footage (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes with news that the NYPD charged a local television station $36k to view police body camera footage. Ars reports: "As body cams continue to flourish in police departments across the nation, an ongoing debate has ensued about how much, if any, of that footage should be made public under state open-access laws. An overlooked twist to that debate, however, has now become front and center: How much should the public have to pay for the footage if the police agree to release it? News network NY1, a Time Warner Cable News operation, was billed $36,000 by the NYPD for roughly 190 hours of footage it requested under the state's Freedom of Information Law (FOIL). Now the network is suing (PDF) the police department in New York state court, complaining that the price tag is too steep. The network said the bill runs 'counter to both the public policy of openness underlying FOIL, as well as the purported transparency supposedly fostered by the BWC (body worn camera) program itself.'"
190 hours, at 36,000 dollars.
~200 dollars an hour to produce.
How many workers does it take to do this?
Isn't that Cam footage from tax payer bought cameras worn by city employees who receive their salary from tax funds? How the hell do they justify charging that kind of money?
Thus, access to the videos, at rate not restrictive enough to prevent its distribution, is a requirement fair play cannot do without.
If a viewing tax restricts the footage from being released, then cameras are worthless except to protect the innocent law enforcement officers.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
TV stations are normally AD-revenue funded. 189 bucks can't even get you a second of AIRTIME let alone any production team.
And besides, if the money funds better police work like better education for the officers (how to handle public incidents better), better material for proper investigations instead of improper funds to get the crimes solved, well - then I'm all for it.
What worries me though is: where does that place US - your average citizen in this picture? What say do we have in this? Do I get a cut as an innocent bystandard in any of these pictures / videos? What if something got out that shouldn’t have, or jeopardizes my family's safety - NOW THAT would be an issue here.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
NYPD was trying to cash in on the public's / tax payer's property. ... ... Gangs of New York 21st Century.
What else is new
Now if only the NYPD gangsters would harass, intimidate and fire upon banksters.
Oh the dream
can they try that in court? make the defender pay a fee to have there legal team view it on there own?
Go ahead and charge them. The media preys upon the misery of others and wants a direct free live feed with 24/7 coverage of cops hassling the public. I can't count the amount of times some traffic cop has pulled me over, given me a full field sobriety test plus breathalyzer despite not having had a drop to drink, and continued to harass me before letting me go. Now imagine I was a public official or celebrity (even worse imagine if I was a republican in a liberal-leaning city) and the TV station had full access to the cop's body cam footage. Despite my innocence it would be plastered ALL OVER TABLOIDS and other sleazy outlets as only the media could to slant and paint it in a bad light.
No thanks. You charge them out the wazoo NYCPD. Good on you for making journalists actually have to hunt down stories and do their jobs.
... seems like quite a lot of footage to request in one go.
Is the station engaged in a fishing expedition, of exactly the sort that we'd all roundly condemn if the cops did it?
NYC allows you to hire officers for private functions.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/public_information/258_06_2015.pdf
This sets a rate.
The review criteria should be published and there should be a way sit and watch the whole review process so you know what you are missing.
They invoiced for $120 per hour times 2 hours for each hour of video provided.
This seems wrong.
First the review is likely mostly boring stuff which could be reviewed at much faster than real time.
Second, the copy should happen at the same time as the review.
Third, the charging they are doing, seems almost chosen to discourage the public use of the video.
This is the reverse of the reason for having the cameras in the first place.
The NYPD should be willing to put in some of the effort necessary to use these videos.
As for how many hours to charge for, I'm not sure that any is the right answer.
But if they are going to charge, then a small percentage of the number of hours of video reviewed seems the max.
If someone was directly involved with the PD, then they should be able to get the footage of that encounter gratis.
A for-profit news might pay a reasonable fee, or get their footage from those directly involved.
It does seem that this is a matter for the legislature to sort out and they already decided this in their public disclosure rules.
NY1 says they said no charging to locate and review documents.
Maybe there is a question as to if these videos should fit into the same set of rules because there are so many of them.
That is different, the defender's legal team would get access to unredacted footage....
All material has to be handed over to the defense team so -- no there would be no cost.
The TV station is just doing a fishing exercise if they are asking for 190 hours of footage and I don't see why the public should be on the hook to make sure that no-ones privacy is being violated. You have to have someone (possibly more than one person)actually watch 190 hours - select out outtakes that should not be released and then go through some sort of official review before the redacted footage is release. It is no small task.
How do you identify people who can be trusted not to reveal confidential information that, if revealed, may cost someone their lives?
I don't have an opinion at the moment, but would like to be more informed of the situation.
Just exactly how can first-person video of what a cop sees cost someone their life if revealed?
Also, can you comment on how *likely* that scenario would be?
Being able to monitor police actions is a very real benefit to society with huge value. We can determine whether the policeman is lying, whether the plaintiff is lying, whether the department's investigation is honest, and whether - as a whole - we should modify existing procedures based on irrefutable evidence.
We need to balance the value to society with the privacy of the individual.
... so what this means is all that crap on that show is fake as hell. They had no problem showing those peoples private lives or problems on national TV for a profit.
$36,000? What did they do, print the video, one frame per page?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Just exactly how can first-person video of what a cop sees cost someone their life if revealed?
If the cop talks to a person who is then considered an informant or snitch by the wrong people.
If when talking to another cop an informant or snitch is referred to.
If anything said to a cop can wind up on TV what do you suppose will be the impact with respect to people coming forward with information? Even reporting a crime?
If disclosure of raw unreacted video identifies a person coming forward with information and that person is killed in retaliation don't you expect that victim's family to file suit against the police?
The public has a right to know if a cop is being honest, truthful, etc. But that is something quite different than seeing every minute of the cop's day, hearing every conversation.
Being able to monitor police actions is a very real benefit to society with huge value.
Absolutely, but that monitoring is not necessarily best done by TV personalities. It may be best done by review boards, judges, etc.
Like, with taxes and shit? Bodycam footage should be free, no question. You've paid for the hardware. You're paying the wages of the cops and the admin staff. Why is this even a debate?
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
Recall the First Amendment mentions and protects a profession by name: the press. Thats a right, guaranteed.
No local finding, act, law, debate, twist gets to take away press freedom.
US tax payers are paying for the footage and its their bureaucracy and officials using equipment paid for by tax payers.
The "police" do not get to just internally "agree" to block a FOIA request from the media.
The body worn camera is a feature to ensure public servants are interacting with the wider public and local, state or wider press review should be no problem.
Other US states really enforce and have strong local laws to support FOIA requests at every level of local bureaucracy.
Why? Good local laws got passed to ensure FOIA was fully available at every level of local government.
Members of the media could also reach out to people who film first amendment audits and accountable grassroots organizations. They often have a lot of interesting interactions under color of law.
The media has it get its First Amendment back in court and start showing the wider public all and any media it wants.
More freedom of the press and less hidden bureaucracy eg Florida has its sunshine laws that are very easy to understand at any level of local bureaucracy and ensure open government for all.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
> the people doing the editing/redacting are already getting paid by the taxpayers. The only additional cost is the physical media
The charge does seem a bit high, but there absolutely is some additional cost to NYPD. We can estimate that finding, ccopying, and redacting all the pieces of video might require about 400 hours. At 40 hours per week, that's 10 employee/weeks. 10 weeks of actual work is about what you'll get for three months of salary, with vacations, holidays, and sick time. So one video tech (and a lawyer?) can do this job in three months.
NYPD didn't already hire a video tech to sit there and do nothing for three months. To get this job done, they'll need to hire someone, perhaps the new won't be the person doing the work, but the new hire might do a job that would otherwise be done by the person pulled away to do this.
The salary of the new hire is about 65%-75% of the total cost of having them- there's also extra insurance and benefit costs, the employer's payroll taxes, unemployment taxes, worker's comp, etc. So the total cost to NYPD should be roughly equal to four months of pay for the person doing the work.
The FBI maintains databases containing what they call "Criminal Justice Information" (CJI). Police departments access it using "Criminal Justice Information Systems" (CJIS) over a "Criminal Justice Data Network" (CJDN).
For your state to get access to these things, the state's top law enforcement agency has to enter into an agreement with the FBI. Part of the agreement involves providing access to local police departments, and getting them to agree to follow the same rulebook.
One of the rules is that "Criminal Justice Information", basically any information that comes from these systems, must be protected from disclosure.
What does that mean for body cameras? If the dispatcher reads anything out of CJIS over the air, and the body camera picks it up, it must be redacted. If the officer has a mobile data terminal, and his body camera catches a glimpse of CJI on the screen, it must be redacted. Hilariously, even if the information is well known publicly, it is still protected if it comes through CJIS. Insane, of course, and the states are trying like mad to negotiate a change on that point.
Sunshine laws generally allow government agencies to pass expenses down to requestors. Redaction is usually done by a pair of lawyers. $200 per hour isn't bad for a team.
See that "Preview" button?
Proof that Corruption in the Police is still alive and well in 2016.
Honestly they are no different than a street gang..
Well except for one, they have far better funding than a street gang.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The use of lies in the daily course of policework is not moral either though. Just typical.
190 hours, at 36,000 dollars. ~200 dollars an hour to produce. How many workers does it take to do this?
Its not just some IT guy making copies of files. Its probably cops and lawyers reviewing the video to make sure victim privacy rights are not infringed and that classified information is not disclosed (identity of people disclosing information privately, references to ongoing investigations, etc). Some things a cop sees or hears should not be on TV; only review boards, judges and juries should see or hear it.
Its not unreasonable to expect the for profit media corporation that wants a copy of the video to pay for the lawyers time to review it. Its part of the "processing" in the processing and handling fee.
The use of lies in the daily course of policework is not moral either though. Just typical.
More importantly its perfectly legal. The courts have repeatedly said that police my lie to a person to trick them into disclosing information. That is something quite different from a police officer lying to an investigator or a court.
That's the way we handle information that may end up as evidence in court.
That's the way we should handle police body cam video. ALL OF IT.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
The Freedom of Information Act does allow a government body to charge for the cost to produce the information requested. This was originally intended to recoup the physical costs of producing photocopies or microfilm. However, since the the footage in question is digitized, how does one come up with a cost of $36,000 to turn it over to the media? I wonder if the prosecuting attorney requested the footage, would the police department had charged the DAs office $36,000? If the answer is no, then neither should it charge the public.
No it is unreasonable. In the past police departments used to charge $10 per page for xeroxing. The courts overruled it. The public needs to pay for the cop salary anyway and they also need to pay for the person who reviews the footage. the networks should only have to pay for the videotape sent over. Its part of the public right to know. So the public (in this case PD) needs to foot the bill since the PD gets paid via taxes anyway.
Not to point out the obvious, but you are saying that:
1) The police review board can *say* that the officers were talking about an informant, and suppress releasing the video of a police shooting.
2) The police can begin talking about informants *on purpose* as they drive up to a crime scene, so that a video of them shooting someone can be suppressed.
That's what you're saying - right?
We have a federal policy with classified information that's just about what you said; ie - the government can classify anything without a detailed reason.
How has that worked out for us?
Mods on crack. Parent is well-considered and contributes substantially to the conversation.
Videotape? Really?
Do you want a gang banger killing you and your family because a police body cam caught you telling a cop you could identify the robber if you saw them again? How about even just threatening you of that if you say anything else or identify the right person?
Sure there is the ability to abuse this process. But retaliating against witnesses is so common throughout history that there are actually laws in place because of it. Of course laws do not matter much to criminals who are already breaking laws.
I can't speak to this specific incident but some FOIL requests can actually be pretty damn expensive to service. First you have to consider what was actually requested. If it's "Please give us all the footage for badge #111 between 1/1/2016 and 1/2/2016" that's pretty easy. On the other hand, if it's "Please give us all the footage for any office who interact with John Doe between 1/1/2014 and 1/1/2016" that gets a bit more cumbersome. You have to identify all the officers who might have had interaction with them and then go through the footage. Now, lets say it's someone who was actively involved in the #blacklivesmatter protests, the number of officers involved could easily be over one hundred for any given protest. Again, I don't know what the specific circumstances were with this request but I've seen some FOIL requests that border on the ridiculous. Which brings us to second issue, some people (usually it's specific individuals, not groups) issue multiple frivolous FOIL requests to help support some inane case their bringing against the city. These lawsuits are generally destined to be thrown out because the make no sense at all but that doesn't keep people from just firing off FOIL requests... so the city does structure fees to discourage this. At the agencies I've worked with they're actually well intentioned and try to strike a good balance between deterrence and open access. Common sense would dictate that you be able to setup a system where someone whose had X% of cases dismissed has to pay a higher fee but finding a system that is 100% perfect is impossible and even if it is you'll have people suing because of it anyway.
Anyway, a lot of theses stories are spun to be very one-sided. Yes, FOIL fees do get abused but it's not as often as most people think. Most of the agencies I've worked for have a dedicated FOIL staff that is well-intentioned and very overworked.
yes really. videotape in this case being the generic term for video-containing-media-on-which-footage-is-stored-on.
I think it's a complex thing.
There's the nominal privacy angle, ie, of showing people or situations in private settings that weren't part of any kind of police action. Then there's the abuse-of-public-access privacy angle, like those web sites that show mug shots unless you pay to take them offline.
Then there's the bigger questions of whether relentless databasing forever of every possible police interaction with the public and using it to make all kinds of really arbitrary decisions based on it, like HR managers who assume any interaction with the police must mean you are a criminal and can't be hired for a job.
Then there's the reality of video footage. Storing, indexing, labeling, editing and managing what could end up being thousands of hours of video footage per day for an agency as large as NYPD is not a trivial task. I've seen a medium-sized city use 3 full racks of Compellent just for their intersection TV cameras.
Then there's the question of the public's legitimate *right* to access it, how to do it without the fucking cops editing out or "losing" footage of unarmed civilians getting gunned down.
I just don't know how you do it without it become a colossal expense, another police abuse of power, or a complete abuse of individual privacy for people who aren't actually accused of a crime. Maybe hand over control of the footage to some kind of ombudsman's office? Sounds like something the cops will never agree to, but allowing the cops to agree to it sounds like a recipe for secrecy. Giving the public unlimited access to it sounds like an episode of Black Mirror. Paying for the whole process sounds like a dubious investment, yet controlling police dishonesty has been problematic even with dash video.
It's an existential quandary.
Let's ask Time Warner Cable News for 190 hours of specified short segments of their raw video material with perpetual, unfettered rights to republish, for profit, and with no ongoing royalty. If you could get them to to agree the conditions (unlikely) then I bet they would charge way more than $36k for the privilege. Somehow though they expect the State to do just that without even cost recovery.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
I bet Time Waner Cable is hoping to lose this fight. Allow the NYPD to charge $36,000 to release something. Then, TWC can charge $36k to let you cancel your cable service.
Not to point out the obvious, but you are saying that: 1) The police review board can *say* that the officers were talking about an informant, and suppress releasing the video of a police shooting.
Review boards often involve civilians. The conversation with/about an informant can be deleted, its unlikely to affect the portrayal of events in a shooting. Note that the TV station is requesting about 200 hours, not the minute or two leading to a shooting.
2) The police can begin talking about informants *on purpose* as they drive up to a crime scene, so that a video of them shooting someone can be suppressed.
Why do you think the entire video needs to be suppressed rather than simply remove the conversation?
Don't need the body cam to know that threat is already existent.
That's why people don't talk, even when it's not on camera.
Let's face it, there really are no more actual news programs on tv. It's all about entertainment now in order to increase viewership and profits. If the broadcaster is going to profit from this, and they certainly will, then let the community bereft as well though a better funded police force. No problem.
This. Additionally, many of the public records laws in place across the country establish standards and procedures that often involve curation of records before release -- which in turn can involve multiple agencies/bureaus/jurisdictions beyond the PD that "owns" the video. The various policies and procedures that have evolved to meet these often myriad and byzantine policy frameworks are often barely able to scale to textual, digital records. When you expand them to accommodate frame-by-frame review and redaction of video prior to release, the issue becomes far less black-and-white than many of the comments make it out to be (in either direction.)
As a fun exercise, extrapolate this to the data that will be created once mass sensor data becomes 'public record' as the IoT becomes adopted by governments.
It's hard to tell the cool to chill, my favorite hotel room has a view to an ill.
We pay for the police.
We pay for the infrastructure.
We pay for their equipment.
We pay for the cams.
We pay for all the support.
We pay for all of he bandwidth.
Knowing the above - we should file for an immediate release of what we pay for with no added cost. And we should drag that case all of the way up tot he supreme court if we have to.
And we should penalize the pensions to pay for the court case from any asshat that protests.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
this is the script to the movie Brazil
Isn't there some way we can gamify this? Journalists should earn credits for transcribing routine traffic stops, and then when they earn enough credits they can buy footage of detective work. Or they can simply pay cash for instant access, $5 will get your 10 silver police shields, and you need 40 shields to unlock the footage from last night's arrest of a prominent doctor.
That is the standard here in Europe.
The Police will only talk to the press (or public) with extremely filterd information and ONLY if it can lead to solving a case.
The rest will be basically "We are working on it. We will keep you informed."
If people have complaints, they can go to http://www.comitep.be/EN/index...
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The public has a right to know if a cop is being honest, truthful, etc. But that is something quite different than seeing every minute of the cop's day, hearing every conversation.
It's not like they're public servants or anything. If they have nothing to hide then they have nothing to fear and all that.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Do you want a gang banger killing you and your family because a police body cam caught you telling a cop you could identify the robber if you saw them again? How about even just threatening you of that if you say anything else or identify the right person?
Do you seriously think that all this footage is going to be live streamed where anyone can just tune in or access a depository of all footage with a handy little search footage feature? Just take one department, How many hours of footage do you think they'll create in a single day with an average sized force and then you'd have to go through all of that just to find a possible mention of someone saying they could identify you. And if that was even a remotest possibility do you not think that a new measure might be put in place so you don't have to just walk up to a cop and start blabbing, Maybe they could, I don't know, get a phone number, outside the box thinking I know,
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Haven't we already chucked the 4th amendment out the window? Might as well make the best of it and mandate that all footage be available to the public after 30 days, no exceptions. None of this $200/hr crap.
Bonus: regular people get body cams, too, if they want them.
Review boards often involve civilians.
Police officers are civilians, despite the move to military armaments.
For me the idea is that if you are somehow implicated in a situation with the law enforcement, you can have evidence of what actually happened.
Not a way for journalists to get free footage so they can exploit it. $200/h is peanuts for them, $200 is what a friend got paid for a few minutes of crappy cell phone footage of a skilift that stalled for a couple of hours.
I'd like the result of the judgment to be : here, have your footage for free, CC BY-NC-SA licensed. But I doubt it will be the outcome.
The Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) is "free" as is speech, not "free" as in beer.
Who knew that the NYPD was GPL compliant??
Get real, companies don't pay taxes.
Charging them for services is just another way to tax, unfortunately these large corporations have the resources to complain about a relatively modest fee. Where as the real tax payers (individuals) have no voice, unless a media company feels it might make good copy.
What he's saying is that they can't be trusted to not use that as an excuse to censor the film, even if it never happened. (If you can't look, you don't know it didn't happen.)
If we look as past analogous circumstances, this is a valid concern. This doesn't mean that it can't be dealt with, but it means that if you don't deal with it, you are likely to be unhappy with the results. And while I think $200/hour is unreasonable, I also think that a reasonable fee might be $50-$100/hour. (OTOH, I also think that the police should NOT be the custodians of the films. They have too much incentive to alter or destroy or lose any incriminating evidence. And there need to be multiple safeguards in place to prevent that from the time the uniform is put on until the the records are deemed irrelevant by an independent assessor.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The footage would be tagged by incident and date/time. Its how it is done here. Suppose you were pulled over, the initial officer generates an incident report. If two other officers show up, they are added to the report. You get a warning -verbal for not using a turn signal long enough and it is noted. You can later get a copy of the incident report along with the footage (I'm familiar with dash camera footage ) by request. All you need is your name and date and it will pull up the incident where everything can be referenced from there.
It isn't just bulk footage. It is separated by incidents.
If the police shoot someone, that video is going to be reviewed. It's possible to bleep out names, and to verify that what's being bleeped out is the names. We're talking about general release when nothing exceptional was happening.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
What he's saying is that they can't be trusted to not use that as an excuse to censor the film, even if it never happened. (If you can't look, you don't know it didn't happen.)
Did you miss the part where I mentioned review boards (that often include civilians) and judges. That recording are reviewed, redactions are only for public releases when necessary to protect sources, officers, etc.
And while I think $200/hour is unreasonable, I also think that a reasonable fee might be $50-$100/hour.
Reviews may involve attorneys, so $200 is not unreasonable.
The public has a right to know if a cop is being honest, truthful, etc. But that is something quite different than seeing every minute of the cop's day, hearing every conversation.
It's not like they're public servants or anything. If they have nothing to hide then they have nothing to fear and all that.
Cops and lawyers need to review the video to make sure victim privacy rights are not infringed and that classified information is not disclosed (identity of people disclosing information privately, references to ongoing investigations, etc). Some things a cop sees or hears should not be on TV; only review boards, judges and juries should see or hear it.
The paper reports that are being xeroxed are "redacted" documentation by their nature, they are not raw video/audio. Plus some paper reports are inherently pubic documents and when they are written that is taken into consideration. The name of a victim may not be given if victim rights issues apply, the name of a suspect may not be given if the subject is a minor, the preceding being simply referred to as "victim", "subject", "suspect", etc. The single line defining who the "victim", "suspect", etc is may be redacted when the previous issues are present.
Perhaps $200 is reasonable.
No, I didn't miss the part where you mentioned review boards. If the review board were to be totally independent of the police, to the extent of being totally separately funded, and if there were a valid custodial chain from the instant the film was shot until it was delivered, then I would consider that sufficient.
Police should be able to argue reasons before the review board, but they should not be on it. I wouldn't trust any part of the adversarial process as it has frequently been shown to be strongly tilted into accepting the word of the police in the teeth of the evidence. An I include judges in the adversarial process. I only include defense attorneys that aren't public defenders in the interest of symmetry, as they show a bias in the other direction. Thus, totally independent. Few review boards that I'm aware of meet that description, and the ones that do are generally too poorly funded and depend on volunteer support, which is not sufficient to ensure proper custodial care.
In fact, I'd probably want this system to be run by historians or librarians, and they tend to extend proper regard to care for records. (And the librarians that I'm thinking of are the ones that operate rare book rooms, not the ones that encourage lending out sole copies of out-of-print books.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.