The City of Boulder has appealed a court ruling requiring it to release police body camera footage of alleged officer misconduct at no cost, escalating a legal battle that could establish statewide precedent on public access to police records.
On Jan. 7, the city filed a notice of appeal with the Colorado Court of Appeals, challenging an August 2024 Boulder County District Court ruling that barred the city from charging fees for body camera footage tied to certain cases of alleged police misconduct.
The case stems from a request by Yellow Scene Magazine for footage of the December 2023 fatal police shooting of Jeannette Alatorre. Boulder police responded by quoting a $1,425 fee for a 13-minute segment, citing costs for retrieving and redacting the footage.
Yellow Scene then filed suit, arguing the fee violated Colorado’s 2020 Enhance Law Enforcement Integrity Act, which was enacted in the wake of nationwide protests over police killings. The law aims to increase transparency by ensuring public access to footage of police use of force. It does not explicitly allow for fees.
Boulder, however, has argued that fees are necessary to cover the costs of redacting sensitive footage, such as blurring faces or muting audio for privacy reasons. The city has cited a separate state law that permits “reasonable fees” for public records, and the police department typically charges $30 per hour to review footage.
In its August ruling, the District Court ruled in favor of Yellow Scene, stating that charging fees undermines the intent of the 2020 law to enhance police accountability and transparency. City officials have expressed concern about the ruling, claiming it places an “undue burden on municipalities.”
In its appeal, the city is asking the Colorado Court of Appeals to determine whether the District Court erred in its decision, in part given that lawmakers “failed to fund that purported mandate.”
The case now moves forward, with the city expected to lay out a detailed legal argument in an opening brief. Yellow Scene will have an opportunity to respond before the appeals court decides how to proceed.
Kudos to community journalism for advocating on behalf of public transparency from the Boulder Police and the BRL covering this as well; whereas this story didn’t even crack the Top 10 in the Daily Camera. I guess this kind of important local issue with wider implications just doesn’t rise to their high standards of clickbait news reporting about Trump, CU fooball, or Dunkin Donut shortages in NM/NZ.
Prairie Mountain Publishing and their Alden Capital)
While I understand the need to charge reasonable fees for releases of many types of government documents and other information, police body-cam data should fall in a category of its own, whereby it becomes fully available to the general public, un-redacted. Body-cam is there for a reason – to help protect suspects AND officers AND near bystanders. Putting exorbitant costs on the material as well the ability to pretty much show, or not show, what authorities deem relevant, erodes public trust in the process. Defendants with little means are hard pressed to get access to this evidence in an accurate, timely and “fairly” (Free in my view – considering the nature of the material) priced manner. There are privacy issues here of course but, if you’re there, in view of the camera, you’ve already given up a significant level of your privacy – good or bad. This is not the same type of government data like bankruptcies for example. Law enforcement needs to be as transparent as possible in order to have public trust, and exorbitant fees and heavily redacted police body-cam footage is NOT a good way to start.