North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) is facing pushback from critics concerned about a law he signed on Monday that keeps police camera recordings out of the public record.
His Democratic challenger for governor, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, told ABC on Tuesday that the law makes it a “lot more difficult” to make footage from police cameras public. The state branch of the ACLU has also condemned the law as “shameful,” saying it reduces “any potential this technology had to make law enforcement more accountable to community members.”
House Bill 972, formerly known as the Body Cam bill, stipulates that only individuals whose image or audio appears in a police dashboard or body camera recording can request to view that file. Even those individuals who do appear in the footage cannot make a copy of it, and law enforcement can deny their requests to view it in the name of safety, reputation protection or an ongoing investigation. Denied requests to access the footage would then be left to the discretion of a superior court judge.
The Tar Heel State’s new law, which CNN reported has been in the works since April, was finalized the week after witnesses captured cellphone video of two black men being fatally shot by police officers in Louisiana and Minnesota. That footage sparked outcry from elected officials, including President Barack Obama, and mass protests in cities across the U.S. At one of those protests in Dallas, a gunman killed five police officers and wounded eleven other people.
McCrory told local TV station WRAL that the recent shootings “shook the nation” and “law enforcement communities,” but he did not say explicitly whether they encouraged him to approve the measure.
Surrounded by law enforcement officers at a news conference, McCrory said that the law promoted “uniformity, clarity and transparency” by establishing clear standards for releasing police videos.
“It’s better to have rules and guidelines with all this technology than no rules and guidelines whatsoever,” said McCrory.
“My goal is to protect those who protect us,” he added.
The North Carolina governor said he was concerned that the release of police footage could “distort” the picture of a police interaction, pointing to the outrage over the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. Chicago police lost their fight to prevent the release of video of McDonald’s final moments, in which he was shot 16 times in 13 seconds as he appeared to walk away from officers.
“We’ve learned in Chicago if you hold a piece of film for a long piece of time you completely lose the trust of individuals,” McCrory said at the news conference, according to CNN. “We’ve learned if you immediately release a video sometimes it distorts the picture, which is extremely unfair to our law enforcement officers.”
“In North Carolina we’re going to walk that fine line and do the right thing, and that’s exactly what this legislation does,” he added.
The law will take effect Oct. 1.
