“ really do everything and go out of their way to make it difficult,” said Shaleen Shanbhag, an attorney representing Ben Montemayor, who filed a federal lawsuit against the LAPD alleging excessive use of force during a Black Lives Matter protest. Rarely does the department release all footage available. Ĭalifornia police are allowed to withhold footage even in critical cases, if they can demonstrate that the release would interfere with an ongoing investigation, or violate privacy. But in practice, accessing the footage remains difficult, according to advocates and attorneys. The critical incident policy is among the most transparent in the US – some police departments have no release policy at all – and California instituted a similar rule for the entire state the following year. Anyone can access this footage on the LAPD’s Disclosable Documents page.

The department changed course, however, in 2018 with a “critical incident policy” that mandated the release within 45 days of footage of encounters including police shootings and cases where police force caused people to suffer great bodily injury or die. The business of the police should by default be in public John Burton, attorneyĮven though activists and politicians had pushed for BWCs as a police accountability tool, the LAPD at first forbade the public release of the footage, citing concerns about privacy and compromising investigations. In the US, too, early reporting on BWCs focused on their potential as an investigative tool rather than their potential to monitor police behavior.

Small police departments in the UK had piloted the cameras as early as 2006, largely as an investigative tool. The police department of American Fork, Utah, in 2007 became the first recorded in the Atlas of Surveillance to use BWCs.

US police departments had started using the technology about a decade before. When police in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed Michael Brown, 18, his family had called upon police departments to adopt BWCs (body-worn cameras) to document police behavior. Like many American police departments, the LAPD adopted the widespread use of body cameras under pressure from activists protesting the police killings of multiple unarmed Black people across the country. The Los Angeles police department (LAPD) is facing at least three lawsuits that hinge on police wrongdoing revealed in body-worn camera footage.

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