(The Center Square) – Obtaining body camera footage from the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office could soon cost a pretty penny under a fee proposed to the Board of County Commissioners on Tuesday.
Public Records Officer Tony Dinaro said the 78-cent fee per minute of redaction time is comparable to those charged by agencies across the state that have already implemented fees. An SCSO study found it takes five minutes of staff time to redact a minute of raw video for targeted redactions without audio.
Five minutes of footage from a single deputy could take about 25 minutes to redact, totaling $19.50 in fees. An incident lasting an hour or longer, with footage from multiple deputies, could result in substantial costs for the requester unless they’re a victim, witness, attorney, state official or appear in the video.
The only other way to avoid the fee is to view the footage in the sheriff’s office on one of their laptops.
“We wanted those videos to be available to people,” Dinaro told the board, “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 goal is cost recovery, not to turn a profit for the sheriff’s office. Dinaro said state law also allows SCSO to charge for the redaction technology, but the proposed fee is only to recoup staff time costs.
State law has allowed law enforcement agencies to charge the body camera redaction fee since 2016.
Lawmakers expanded that statute in 2018, but it requires that the charges be “reasonable” for the time required to redact footage using the least costly available technology. According to Dinaro’s presentation, Spokane County staff redact footage frame by frame, which can require multiple passes to black out faces, mute audio, redact anything that might be deemed offensive to a reasonable person and more.
Tacoma charges 49 cents per minute of staff redaction time for body camera footage; Seattle charges 80 cents; Olympia charges 75 cents; and the city of Spokane charges 76 cents. The proposed 78-cent fee aligns, but not without consequences, according to a study on how fees affect requesters.
“Fees serve as a barrier for those that cannot pay, namely, regular citizens, journalists, and scholarly researchers, among others,” according to a 2023 study that surveyed 330 public records requesters about their opinions on freedom of information fees. “Our results indicate that fees create inequity by privileging those who can pay — such as lawyers and businesses — to the detriment of citizens.”
George Erb, secretary of the Washington Coalition for Open Government, responded to questions from The Center Square in an email, citing that 2023 study. He agreed that fees pose a barrier to obtaining public records, but noted that state law limits agencies’ ability to charge arbitrary fees to some extent.
Board of County Commissioners Chair Mary Brooks said Tuesday that the county knew it would take time to work out details like this when the deputies started wearing body cameras in 2022. Dinaro said SCSO hasn’t looked at how much money the fee could raise because they don’t think the YouTube channels will be willing to pay.
However, if approved, the fee would also hit government watchdogs, journalists and everyday citizens.
The county will host a public hearing over the proposed fee on March 24 to consider community input.
“Any barrier to public records limits the ability of the public to examine their government’s performance and the health of their communities,” Erb told The Center Square. “We freely admit that some government information is not in the public interest. But our default setting is transparency and informed citizens.”
