Be Like Batman and Tell Your Common Council Members Not To Create The New Policies Charging For Video Footage!
- Rexroth E.F. Washington
- Jul 16
- 2 min read
Title: Be Like Batman and Tell Your Common Council Members Not to Create The New Policies Charging For Video Footage! Author: Rexroth E. F. Washington Date: 07/16/2025 If we've learned anything from the 2008 "Batman Darkknight" hit movie, it should be that massive linked surveillance systems might protect us, but it might be far too much power to turn over to any entity as well. Lucius Fox, played by Morgan Freeman, warns Christian Bale's Batman that linked citizen surveillance is too much power for any one person (or entity).
The premise of this now 17-year-old film remains quite solid. We should not be giving the police the power to film (almost soley since they've made laws backing the public away from them), redact, and decide who gets footage, and are allowed to charge for that footage (from equipment citizens paid for) is far too much power in the hand of one agency, person, or group. After writing earlier in the week about SB Common Council Bill that would allow the police to charge for video that clearly already belongs to the public, several readers pointed out that the city has also requested citizens to register their private cameras from their yards and doorbells so that police might access that footage as well.
By the logic of the new Common Council proposal, it would seem that citizens then should get to redact anything they would like from the videos prior to turning them over to police and charging the police up to $150 per incident that is requested, desired, or utilized in any way. There should likely also be a fee paid annually to citizens who have their cameras registered with the police for this service.
When the police force first requested citizen video access, privacy advocates and those worried about increasing militarism from the police warned that this could turn into a real problem in our community and the larger nation.
The police have shown themselves incapable of being the sole arbiters of video footage through their other institutional troubles, especially in our community. To keep our communities safe, we need video recordings from the police to be turned over daily to a third-party entity to hold the police and our fellow citizens accountable.
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