It could soon cost the public considerably more to obtain South Bend police officers’ body and dash camera videos, under a bill the South Bend Common Council will start discussing tonight.
Indiana’s Access to Public Records Act lets police charge a fee to cover the time it takes to produce public records when people request them. At Monday night’s South Bend Common Council meeting, they’ll begin debating a bill to increase those fees up to $150 per recording, depending on how long it takes police to process the request.
The county council in 2022 created fees to cover the sheriff’s department’s labor costs in redacting private information from videos people request. They said the vast majority of those requests come from personal injury attorneys.
But many dash and body cam requests also come from citizen police watchdog groups and people with police misconduct complaints. South Bend Common Council Member Oliver Davis starting pushing the department to get the body cams in 2014, and the department got them in 2018.
Davis says he’s researching what other cities are doing, but he worries about the fees.
“I’m very concerned that some of the people who may be affected by this may not have enough money to pay for the costs," Davis says. "That goes against the whole efforts that we had to even push for transparency.”
City spokeswoman Allison Zeithammer says on average, processing a police recording with redactions takes about three times the video’s length.
