Ohioans may soon lose easy access to public police and jail footage after a controversial provision crept into the outgoing legislature’s expansive bill package at the end of the session.
Late Thursday night, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWinesigned H.B. 315 into law, a roughly 450-page omnibus bill that — among other things — will allow law enforcement agencies to charge the public for access to police videos, including body cameras, dash cams and jail surveillance footage.
With the new law, agencies are now permitted to charge an “estimated cost” of up to $75 per hour of footage to help reimburse for the labor of processing the video, according to News 5 Cleveland and Dayton Daily News. The fee will be charged before footage is released, and must be capped at $750 per request.
Amid pushback for approving the provision, DeWine told News 5 that he is a “strong proponent” of police cameras and does not intend to impede access to footage, which is public record.
“Law enforcement-worn body cameras and dashboard cameras have been a major improvement for both law enforcement investigations and for accountability,” he said in a separate news release on Thursday night.
“However, I am sensitive to the fact that this changing technology has affected law enforcement by oftentimes creating unfunded burdens on these agencies, especially when it comes to the often time-consuming and labor-intensive work it takes to provide them as public records.”
Republican state Rep. Bill Seitz, who sponsored the bill, Perviously told News 5 that the provision “only applies if you want the public office to make a copy of a video record, and only if it relates to law enforcement, and only if the public office opts to charge.”
He clarified that people can still “inspect the records for free and make your own video of the video with your own phone or camera.”
Still, one Republican state lawmaker, Niraj Antani, told the outlet that he is “deeply concerned” that the fee to put footage into public record will be “burdensome.”
“When I sponsored HB 425, which established public record law for police worn body camera videos, our goal was to ensure the public and news media had clear access to body camera videos of public concern,” Antani told News 5.“Certainly, the cost of properly blurring out the videos and storage was something we discussed at length with our law enforcement partners.”
Case Western Reserve University Law Professor Jonathan Entin previously explained how the provision could have a practical effect on whether police footage sees the light of day.
“People are talking about how it’s hard to afford groceries these days, or clothing or the car or your medicines, right?” Entin told News 5 when the bill was first passed by the legislature. “If you’ve got all those things, having to pay $75 an hour for video — even for one hour — might bust your budget and therefore, you might not ask.”
