Who gets to see the footage?

On September 20, 2016, Rakeyia Scott stood outside an apartment complex in Charlotte, North Carolina, filming on her phone as police officers surrounded her husband's truck. "He doesn't have a gun," she shouted. "He has a TBI," meaning a traumatic brain injury.² Officer Brentley Vinson then shot and killed Keith Lamont Scott, 43. Police said Scott stepped out holding a gun and refused orders to drop it. His family said he was unarmed.¹

Vinson was not wearing a body camera, but other officers' cameras and a dashboard camera had recorded the scene.² Police Chief Kerr Putney at first refused to release the video. "Transparency is in the eye of the beholder," he told reporters, adding that he did not want to "display a victim's worst day for public consumption."¹

Four days after the shooting, police released portions of the footage. It did not show Scott holding a gun. The family's lawyer, Justin Bamberg, said "it is impossible to discern from the videos what, if anything, Mr. Scott is holding in his hands."² In November the district attorney ruled the shooting justified, pointing to store surveillance video that appeared to show a holstered handgun on Scott's ankle.³

Charlotte had the cameras. What it lacked was agreement on who should see the footage, and when.

A law that closed the files

Two months before the shooting, Governor Pat McCrory had signed House Bill 972. Starting October 1, 2016, it took police body and dashboard camera footage out of North Carolina's public records. People who appear in a recording can ask to see it, but if police say no, they have to go to court.⁴

"My goal is to protect those who protect us," McCrory said. Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison argued that releasing everything could hurt the people on camera, such as the people in footage from a domestic assault call. "We don't want that on YouTube," he said. The ACLU of North Carolina called the law "shameful." Its policy counsel, Susanna Birdsong, said people filmed by police "should not have to spend time and money to go to court" to see the footage.⁴

A deadline, and an edited version

California went the other way. Since July 1, 2019, its police agencies must release body camera footage within 45 days when an officer fires a gun or uses force that causes death or great bodily harm.⁵ "This law sets clear expectations for agencies - they can no longer withhold body camera video or audio from us," said Assemblymember Phil Ting, whose bill, AB 748, created the rule.⁵

A deadline does not settle what the public actually sees. After a police shooting in San Diego in June 2020, the department released a video within 24 hours. It was not the raw footage but a package made by a private contractor for $5,000, and the department had final approval.⁶ "The video is not about what's best, but what happened," said police spokesman Lt. Shawn Takeuchi. Bey-Ling Sha, a communications dean at California State University, Fullerton, disagreed: "Paying an outside vendor to create a video package is not truly being objective." Community activist Tasha Williamson put it simply: "Release the whole entire video, not segments of the video."⁶

Families have a voice too. In 2024, after an Illinois sheriff's deputy shot Sonya Massey in her kitchen, officials delayed the video "at the request of the family of Sonya Massey and their legal representative."⁷ When it came out on July 22, it showed Massey, who had called 911 about a possible intruder, raising her hands and apologizing before she was shot. The deputy, Sean Grayson, was charged with first-degree murder.⁸

Even the full video is not the whole story

Many people hope that releasing video will end arguments. Research suggests the camera itself shapes what viewers conclude. In eight experiments with 2,119 people, published in 2019, Broderick Turner, Neal Roese and colleagues found that "body cam video of an incident results in lower observer judgments of intentionality than dash cam video of the same incident."⁹ Because the officer wearing the camera is mostly out of the frame, Roese described a "diminished sense of blame or responsibility for the person who's wearing the body cam."¹⁰

Back in Charlotte, Chief Putney had made a similar point before any video came out. "There's your truth, my truth and the truth," he said.¹

Questions to think about

Should video of a police shooting be open to everyone, or only to the people in it and the courts?

When police edit a video to explain what happened, is that helpful context or spin?

Whose wishes should count most: the public's, the family's, or those of other people caught on camera?

For the strongest arguments on each side, see our pro and con guide below.