With proliferation of websites sharing police body camera footage, Spokane County considers new records fees

YouTubers earning big money by posting police body camera footage may be dinged with new, higher fees in Spokane County.

Spokane County Sheriff’s Office leaders are proposing to impose new fees on the public for body cam footage requests, nearly five years after deputies first strapped on the cameras.

Spokane County Public Records officer Tony Dinaro told the county commissioners last week that the proliferation of social media creators requesting body cam footage to use as content led to the request for a fee to offset the costs of redacting the footage for public consumption.

“We wanted those videos to be available to people,” Dinaro said. “But what’s happened is we’ve become sort of the victim of a cottage industry of national YouTube channels that have found that we don’t charge for video, so they request those videos so that they can put them on YouTube.”

The commissioners on Tuesday will consider a fee of 78 cents per minute of time it takes staff to obscure portions of film that the law says should not be public. The rate was determined by a cost analysis that factored what county employees are paid for the work and the amount of time they spend redacting footage.

The rate is about the same with what the cities of Olympia, Seattle and Spokane currently charge, as reported by the Center Square.

The sheriff’s office ran stopwatch trials with the public records specialists to determine how much time it took them to process videos, and then used the employees’ weighted salaries to determine the cost per minute, Dinaro said. The analysis found it took the specialists an average of five minutes to redact just one minute of raw body cam footage.

“So if you needed to redact the face of one person, and they’re in the video for about five minutes, that would be 25 minutes of redaction time,” he said.

The new fees would not apply to people requesting body cam footage they are directly involved in, or if they have a criminal or civil case the footage is pertinent to. Their attorneys would also be exempt from the charges, and there is an additional carve -out for the executive directors of the Washington state commissions on African American Affairs, Asian Pacific American Affairs and Hispanic Affairs.

Washington and federal law allows for redactions when content on the body cameras is related to medical treatment and health care information, “intimate images” or when it is considered “highly offensible to a reasonable person,” the analysis states. Redactions also can be made based on who is depicted, like if minors are involved, victims and witnesses of domestic violence and sexual assault and people with apparent mental illnesses who are in crisis.

The redactions can take a couple of forms. Some are targeted audio or video blocks removing some portions, like a black box partially covering someone’s face while the remainder of the footage on screen is still visible. Others are more extreme, including complete removal of sections of audio and completely blocking out the entire frame of footage.

Dinaro said public records law allows for anyone to review public records free of charge, so those who want to review body camera footage without having to pay the fees for redaction could do so by setting an appointment with the sheriff’s office to stop by in person and watch the footage on a provided laptop.

The footage would still be redacted; the charges would mainly apply when copies of that footage are made to fulfill requests, many of which come from social media creators, Dinaro said.

“They’re not even local to us, so they’re not going to come and watch the video,” he said.

A 2023 nationwide study led by communications and open records experts Jay Wagner, of Marquette University, and David Cullier, of the University of Florida, found that fee systems are more of an impediment for private citizens and journalists than attorneys and commercial requesters like data brokers and social media creators. The survey found wealthy requesters have the means to push on, while the average citizen would more likely be deterred .

“The right to see government information is not for a ‘particular group,’ but rather, to every citizen,” Wagner and Cullier wrote. “Government, as the U.S. founders appeared to believe, should not charge its citizens money to interact, just as a person would not be levied a cover charge to attend city council meetings, a poll tax to vote, or a consulting fee to talk with one’s elected official.”

When asked by Commissioner Chris Jordan, Dinaro said he did not have any estimate as to how much revenue would be generated by the new fees. Jordan also confirmed with Dinaro that the county has established payment systems in place if the fees are approved next week.

“Frankly, we don’t believe that a lot of those national YouTube channels will pay,” Dinaro said. “They’ll probably stop making those requests if they have to pay.”

The Spokane County commissioners will hold a public hearing on the proposed fee at 2 p.m. Tuesday in the commissioner hearing room in the Public Works Building, 1026 W. Broadway Ave.