Duluth Case Shows Police Body Camera Footage Is New Legal Battleground

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/27834-duluth-case-shows-police-body-camera-footage-is-new-legal-battleground

When a man in Duluth, Minnesota, barricaded himself in a garage at his home and threatened to kill himself with a knife, police officers shot him twice. The incident, which happened in August, was captured on police body cameras.

Months later, city officials who want the body camera video kept secret are in a battle with advocates of police accountability that many believe will be fought out in the Minnesota legislature.

The man who was shot by police, 34-year-old Joe Zontelli, survived. The two officers involved were cleared of wrongdoing. But the incident made news in the midwest city of 86,000, and after an investigation was completed by the St Louis County attorney Mark S Rubin, reporters expected the video to be released. It was not.

“The state crime lab kind of takes over the investigation and we just kind of waited out the results,” said Tom Olsen, a reporter for the Duluth News Tribune who filed a public records request for the police body camera videos. He said that under normal circumstances, reporters would have received their information requests after an investigation was complete and a press conference held.

The county prosecutor reviewed body camera footage, but authorities didn’t release the videos. Gunnar Johnson, the Duluth city attorney, instead used a legal maneuver to try to temporarily classify the video – and future videos from other cases

Duluth requested the state clarify what body camera footage is public and what should be kept private, through an unusual request to Minnesota’s information policy analysis division. The office denied Duluth’s request, in what will be the final word on the issue unless the legislature picks it up this spring.

[malaise]

1. If video evidence of any employee or citizen is par for the course

on what basis should it be kept secret for the police?
They are mere employees -they are not above the law.

[Feral Child]

2. Civilian review.

What use is video if it's only accessible by the Justice System? Refusing to allow access hints at wanting to be able to hide their actions, a culture of secrecy that hints at abuse.

[Recursion]

4. It's an interesting question

There's got to be a way to anonymize the stuff that really should be private (eg, the police responding to a suicide threat and talking the guy down off the bridge or whatever -- I think we can all agree that shouldn't be made public).

[Nuclear Unicorn]

3. I'll give them something to cry about --

Let's defund their guns and only fund body cameras.

The people own everything that makes the police what they are: the guns, the cameras, the uniforms, the badges, the cars, the station -- THE LAW. If they cannot safeguard what they are entrusted to keep they will not be allowed to keep it. And we don't need a revolution to do it because cops aren't the only ones who can turn their backs.

[Trillo]

5. "the Duluth city attorney", just another Bad Cop.

Now wonder there are so many bad cops. They're directed by bad, lawyerly cops.

[Trillo]

6. Fair is fair. Cops watching us versus us watching them.

These cameras need to be live streamed to a public website. This will allow a third party organization to record all of them, and have tapes available under Freedom of Information laws.

The camera's on-off switch should never be under the control of any police agency, they should be "always on".

Privacy concerns are irrelevant when cops and other surveillance agencies can look through our building walls, which to human senses seem solid and opaque, but to technological means, are transparent. The cops have already seen us have, or not have, intimate relations, use the toilet, brush our teeth, etc.

If the general public can not stomach this, while simulteneously watching porn in the "apparent privacy" of their homes, then the live feeds should go to a third party agency, one not affiliated in anyway with "police" (this essentially means government), and all tapes made available in accordance with any privacy laws that may apply, tapes made available to journalists, defense or advocacy attorneys, and even youtube for the general public.

The police, and police leaders, including corrupt local DAs, need to understand the public is WATCHING THEM. They have no compunctions about telling the public they're WATCHING US (lots of other examples). Fair is fair.