Video of Charlotte Police Shooting Could Be the Last Released in North Carolina

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/us/keith-scott-shooting-video-charlotte.html

Version 0 of 1.

Facing pressure from politicians and protesters, the police in Charlotte, N.C., on Saturday released body and dashboard camera video footage of the fatal shooting of Keith Lamont Scott.

Had they waited a week, a bill that was signed into law in July would have made it much more difficult for the footage to become public.

House bill 972 established that recordings made by law enforcement officials — including those from body and dashboard cameras — would no longer be a matter of public record. It was ratified on June 30 and signed by Gov. Pat McCrory on July 11.

The relevant sections of the bill go into effect on Oct. 1.

After that, footage captured by the police will be disclosed only to a person or representative of the person “whose image or voice” is included in the recording, according to the law. Anyone else interested in obtaining the recording will be required to make a formal, written request.

“This legislation fulfills our commitment to protect our law enforcement and gain public trust by promoting uniformity, clarity and transparency,” Mr. McCrory said on the day of the signing.

The legislation drew criticism. “Body cameras should be a tool to make law enforcement more transparent and accountable,” Susanna Birdsong, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union in North Carolina, said in a statement on the day the bill was signed. “This shameful law will make it nearly impossible to achieve those goals,” she added.

Politicians and law enforcement officials across the country have argued that by using body cameras, police departments can gain the trust of local communities. In December 2014, President Obama proposed an investment package to increase the use of the devices, requesting $75 million in federal funds that the White House said “could help purchase 50,000 body worn cameras” over three years.

But the cameras have become a point of contention between top police officials and rank-and-file uniformed officers. Boston’s police commissioner, William Evans, went to court last month after the city’s largest police union accused him of conscripting officers into wearing cameras for what was supposed to be a volunteer program.

In a report released in July, the inspector general for the New York Police Department found that the department needed to make some upgrades to their body camera policies,recommending that officers turn on the devices more frequently when engaging with suspects and urging that footage taken on patrol be kept for longer periods.

Experts say, however, that video captured by the cameras can be misleading or indecisive.

In an interview with The Times in 2014, Mary D. Fan, a criminal law professor at the University of Washington School of Law and a former federal prosecutor, said, “We shouldn’t just think of video as the safeguard of truth: ‘Now we have incontrovertible evidence of the truth of what happened.’

“It isn’t necessarily the magic bullet, that now we know the truth and that we’ll all agree, we’ll see the same thing and agree on the same thing,” she said.

In a recent interview with CNN, Governor McCrory embraced that point in defending North Carolina’s new law. “One viewpoint of a video doesn’t often always tell the whole story,” he said, adding, “The video is one piece of evidence. We have to be careful.”

And Kerr Putney, chief of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police, initially resisted entreaties by activists, community leaders and the news media to make public the police video of the encounter with Mr. Scott, saying the video was not “definitive.”

But many police officials — including some in North Carolina — say they believe that releasing body camera footage is the best way to help communities understand the actions of the police, whether positive or negative.

In an interview with The Charlotte Observer the day after the bill was signed, Harold Medlock, the chief of police in Fayetteville, N.C., and a former deputy chief in Charlotte, expressed his support for body cameras, saying, “Police departments and law enforcement agencies need to find every way possible to demonstrate the work going on every day.”

“There is no better way to do that than through body camera footage that the public can see,” he said, adding, “Sometimes we do ourselves a great disservice by not disclosing as much information as we can.”