Public records advocates argue that an Arizona law permitting police departments to charge hourly rates for reviewing body-worn camera footage before release is resulting in significant fees for the public and potentially unlawful charges, The AZ Mirror reports. But the law’s main proponent said that’s just a sign that it’s working as intended because the whole point was to charge enough money for the video to deter frivolous requests. Last year, the Arizona legislature passed a measure that allows a one-time fee of $46 “per video-hour reviewed” for public records requests to law enforcement agencies that seek footage from body-worn cameras. The measure, by Republican state Sen. John Kavanagh, a former New York police officer, was signed into law by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs in June 2023. The implementation of the new fee is not universal and agencies across the state have varying levels of fees. Of the 25 agencies that the Mirror gathered information on and who responded to requests for their fee schedules, 11 charge the maximum of $46 an hour, sometimes with additional fees. Many others have fees close to the $46 dollar threshold.
In the 2023 legislative session, Kavanagh told his legislative colleagues that the goal was to create “reasonable fees” for body-worn camera requests. He said he was not opposed to transparency, but the costs associated with being transparent — including redacting records and editing videos — had become “expensive.” Kavanagh said the $46 hourly charge was designed to cover the cost of the employee who is undertaking the redaction efforts on the video footage. Kavanagh said that police budgets were being negatively impacted by large requests for body-worn camera footage, citing “horror stories” of people requesting “mountains” of public records to only inspect them for 10 to 20 minutes. The weaponization of the public records process has become a concern for many local governments, as groups have flooded them with a variety of requests, often related to culture war issues or the election, that take up a vast amount of time and money.
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