The California Supreme Court ruled unanimously the police departments cannot ask for fees for redacting body camera videos before releasing them. Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuellar wrote that the fees should not be charged for routine tasks, fees that could obstruct the public’s right to see the videos. (Sacramento Bee, May 28, 2020, by Rosalio Ahumada)
The National Lawyer’s Guild brought the lawsuit after the City of Hayward wanted to charge them $3,200 to redact 232 minutes of body camera footage of protests sparked by police shootings of black men. The Hayward police were offering support to Berkeley police during protests in 2014. Wrote First Amendment Coalition’s David Snyder in an e-mail, “California law has long been clear that the costs of redaction must be borne by the government, and the fact that there was some technology involved here doesn’t change that.” Said Rachel Lederman, an attorney for the lawyer’s guild, “As we see from the police killing of George Floyd just this week, and so many others, police racist violence is as much of an issue today as it was in 2014. Body cameras can’t fully serve their function of promoting police accountability if it is prohibitively expensive for the public to access the videos.” (The San Jose Mercury News, May 29, 2020, by Thomas Peele)