Summary
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed a bill allowing law enforcement agencies to charge up to $750 per video for public records requests involving police body cams, dash cams, or jail surveillance.
Critics, including the NAACP and ACLU, argued the fees could discourage public access to critical footage, such as videos of police encounters.
The fee is optional and capped to reflect production costs, but must be paid upfront.
DeWine defended the bill but expressed openness to revising the law if unintended consequences arise. Previously, public record fees were limited to nominal copying costs.
But don’t public tax dollars pay for the police force??
Our tax dollars pay for tons of things we are supposed to benefit from, but it seems like a lot of the time, we don’t see those benefits we’re supposed to be getting.
This sure seems like another way of making it easier to cover that bullshit up, especially when poor people are affected.
If you consider funds derived from fines, fees, and civil asset forfeiture taxes, then yeah.
I thought that was on top of the public funding. Greedy pigs.
With that point I could possibly see the justification for charging non-Ohioans (I think that’s what they’re called) but not residents. Just because I can see the justification in that doesn’t mean I agree with it though.
Does that mean that police will pay up to $750 for CCTV video footage requested for evidence now? Yeah I didn’t think so.
Actually, I wonder if this could be used as a precedent for getting compensation when you have to comply with a subpoena.
Government: Rules for thee, not for me
I’d charge double and give at least half to the victims. I’ll keep some for the cleaning costs of dealing with swine.
Suggest a law to help make it harder to reveal unintended consequences, but revise if unintended consequences happen. Got it
The unintended consequence would not shielding the police from accountability as much as they intended to.
Seems that charging fees like that will make it profitable to hire video editors to provide a “top notch highlighted edits reel” for every FOI reasons, what could possibly go wrong?
