Iowa’s open records law on body camera footage murky, expert says

DES MOINES - Judy Bradshaw hopes Iowa lawmakers take a deliberate, cautious approach to writing new state laws regarding what kinds of police body camera footage should be available to the public.

Jeff Danielson hopes a new state policy arrives sooner than later, but realistically, he thinks it is unlikely.

Their comments were made during a panel discussion Thursday on police body cameras and how recorded footage should be treated under state open records laws.

Law enforcement, legislative, civil rights, legal and media perspectives were represented on the panel. The discussion was hosted by The Des Moines Register and the Iowa Newspaper Association.

As Iowa law enforcement and public safety agencies begin using body cameras to record interactions with the public, questions arise about how the state's open records laws will relate to body camera footage.

Most on Thursday's panel agreed state lawmakers should clarify existing open records law to address the many questions raised by the use of police body cameras. Should all footage be public? Should current open records exemptions also apply to body camera footage? How long should footage be retained before being discarded?

Danielson, a Democratic state senator from Waterloo, would like to see state action, but he cautioned that is unlikely to happen during next year's legislative session for several reasons, starting with the fact that few state lawmakers have the issue on their radar.

Danielson said he thinks the Legislature will be unable to reach agreement on policy before cases are resolved in court.

'The courts, I think, are going to be the policymakers by default,” Danielson said.

Bradshaw, the director of the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy, said she thinks it is appropriate for lawmakers to move slowly and tread carefully when considering changing state law to address body camera footage.

She said lawmakers should allow law enforcement agencies to use the tools and get a feel for them before writing new laws to regulate them.

'They can't mandate every single thing until we live it,” Bradshaw said. 'Sometimes, you have to live life and experience it and live through an issue to be able to determine how do we make it better.”

Jerry Anderson, a Drake University law professor, warned that proceeding without new standards to regulate body camera footage would be 'not good.”

'If there can be clarity, it would help a lot,” Anderson said. 'Under current Iowa law, it's very murky.”

He said four key questions must be answered:

' Whether footage deals with an ongoing investigation.

' Whether it contains facts or circumstances relevant to a case.

' Whether it interferes with or endangers the case.

' Whether an individual's privacy rights are 'unjustifiably invaded.”

Otherwise, Anderson said, many cases will wind up in court, and at that point, how the open records law is applied to body cameras will depend largely on which judge hears the case.

The two-hour discussion addressed the many nuances of weighing the public's right to monitor government actions against individual privacy rights.

ACLU of Iowa Executive Director Jeremy Rosen said his organization sees the open records issue from multiple angles.

He thinks the majority of body camera footage likely will not contain information that is important for public view and should be discarded immediately.

Rosen also said in cases where the manner of interaction between police and the public is disputed, body camera footage can be helpful in providing unbiased evidence that should be made public.

Danielson implored law enforcement agencies to err on the side of transparency and lamented the nearly 70 exceptions to current open records law that can be applied to body camera footage and other police records.