Assembly OKs police camera bill

Proposed law would keep most footage private

MADISON – Police body camera footage would be kept from the public in many cases, under a bill the state Assembly approved Thursday.

Rep. Jesse Kremer (R-Kewaskum) said Assembly Bill 351 will protect the rights of victims, witnesses and ordinary citizens who encounter the police.

“We’ve been giving up a lot of privacy with the technology that’s out there, especially since 9/11. We feel like we’re kind of treading on thin ice as it relates to the Fourth Amendment,” said Kremer, referring to the constitutional provision protecting people from unreasonable searches.

The Assembly sent the bill to the Senate on a voice vote. Its fate there is uncertain.

But critics said the bill will too often keep the public in the dark, preventing people from getting a clear view of crime in their communities and how the officers are responding to it.

“This is a bad bill that if passed will deny access to videos the public is paying for, based on category and not common sense,” Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, wrote in an email to the group’s supporters last week. “It will even keep police from releasing video that backs up their accounts. It does nothing to respect or protect the public’s right to see these videos, undercutting the whole reason for their existence.”

Rep. Chris Taylor (D-Madison) said she believed the state should set clear rules at a time when police departments are increasingly equipping their officers with body cameras.

Kremer’s bill goes too far, she said. “It’s going to make it harder for the public to get body camera footage that they’re paying for,” she said.

The bill would not require departments to use body cameras, but sets policies they must abide by if they do.

Under the bill, most footage would be kept from the public. Footage would be available under the state’s open records law if it was taken in a public place and involved a death, physical harm, an arrest or a search.

If death, physical harm, arrests or searches occurred in a place where someone would ordinarily expect privacy, the footage could be released only if all victims and witnesses agreed to that in writing. The owner of the property where the police encounter occurred in most cases would also have to sign off on its public release.

Democrats said that provision meant slumlords could prevent footage taken in their run-down apartments from being released, even when the tenants and police wanted it to be made public. Kremer disputed that, saying tenants were the ones who would determine if footage would be released in such a circumstance.

Rep. Peter Barca (D-Kenosha) said that part of the bill was ambiguous at best and was one of the reasons the measure wouldn’t make it to GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s desk.

“The public has a right to know,” he said. “That’s why your bill’s not going anywhere in the Senate, quite frankly.”

Milwaukee in recent years began equipping all its street officers with body cameras. In 2015, Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn praised the plan to do that because “it’s going to overwhelmingly put in context what (police officers are) dealing with, what they try and do and what actually happens.”

In 2015, the department released footage of police responding to a drugrelated home invasion in which two armed men took a couple hostage.

If Kremer’s bill had been the law at the time, the police could not have released it without the permission of the hostages, who were held after the incident for keeping a drug house.

The state’s public records law already allows authorities to withhold information under several circumstances.

Police agencies routinely deny requests for incidents that are under investigation. For example, the body camera footage of the fatal officer-involved shooting that led to a riot in Sherman Park in August 2016 was not made public until the officer’s trial 10 months later.

Senate leaders have not said whether they plan to take up the bill when they return to the Capitol in January. Both houses are controlled by Republicans.