As Massachusetts tries to figure out how to implement body cameras for police, the State House is revisiting all the questions that made the cameras so controversial in the first place: Who should wear them? How much should they record? And, who should get access to the footage? WGBH State House reporter Mike Deehan spoke with WGBH Radio’s Arun Rath about possible regulations. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Arun Rath: So let's start with the big controversy brewing right now: Should police body camera footage be considered a public record, available to the press and members of the public? Tell us what's at stake there and how it's playing out at the State House.
Mike Deehan: It's kind of interesting that this became a flash point in a much larger debate over how to regulate police body cameras in general. It's something that the state of Massachusetts and all the different communities that are looking into police cameras are trying to reckon with — whether or not this video footage should be a public document, which would mean that it could be FOIA’ed [Freedom of Information Act], so to speak, at the state level by the press, by the public, by different kinds of civic actors. It has become a kind of fascinating argument about civil rights when it comes to whether or not there are privacy concerns for all parties in this video footage. And this kind of came up at a hearing last week. Rep. Denise Provost from Somerville would exempt the recordings from the existing public records law, meaning that it wouldn't be accessible to the press and to the public.
Rath: We've heard from civil rights groups, the ACLU and so on, who say it would be bad to have these recordings secret, since that would sort of defeat the whole point of police having these body cameras. What's the argument for making them secret?
Deehan: I spoke to Provost today, and she says that it's really more about protecting suspects or anyone who's captured on that footage rather than portraying the behavior of the police. This is, basically when it comes down to it, another form of government surveillance on people, and those people have privacy rights. She used an example at the hearing last week of a woman who was detained while she was getting ready for work, and she was held outside of her home in her underwear when the police realized that they were actually after someone else. This is a good example of the kind of footage that might be captured when a police body camera is activated. This larger bill about the regulations would govern when and when not a camera would be activated.
Read more: Bill Would Exempt Bodycam Recordings From Public Records Law
Rath: Now, Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin got involved in the debate as well. Tell us, where did he come down on this?
Deehan: Galvin is very adamant that it should be a public record, that this exemption that is proposed in Provost’s bill should not go forward. Galvin thinks that it should be something that the press and the public could have access to.
And just to be clear, this doesn't mean that there would be a database online with all the police camera footage. This would be very similar to the way you and I and other members of the press acquire information from the state. There are requests to be made, there are different steps you have to take, and someone high up is going to look at this, blur out certain things, and bleep out certain things that aren't pertinent to the news gathering. Galvin says that there are existing laws to protect anyone that's captured on that footage, for example, a witness to a crime — they would be blurred out, their face wouldn't be recognizable, their voice would be changed.
Rath: So, a lot of strong opinions on all sides of this. How does this now play out in the State House in terms of making rules? Where does it go from here?
Deehan: It's important not to lose the thread of this overarching debate about getting more police body cameras out into the community. The proponents of this bill do say that lawmakers are going to have to deal with this body camera issue one way or another. Not necessarily just this public records angle on it, but what do we do when a bunch of different towns have wildly different protocols and procedures when it comes to how body cameras operate?
Rath: It's a lot of really weighty stuff, Mike. I get the feeling that we are far from done talking about this.
Deehan: It's going to be a good one, and I think every town that adopts a body camera piece of legislation is going to see these questions rise up on the local level, and that's going to give more impetus for the state legislature to take it on and write a law sometime over the next few years.
