Getting body camera footage from the South Bend police may soon cost those who make minimum wage approximately 2.5-3 days' wages.
- Rexroth E.F. Washington
- Jul 12
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 16
Title: Getting body camera footage from the South Bend police may soon cost those who make minimum wage approximately 2.5-3 days' wages.
Author: Rexroth E.F. Washington
Date: 07/12/2025
As a public, we were sold on the idea that officers carrying body cameras would help protect us all. Communities around the United States bought these cameras for police departments and the requisite training, and more, in hopes that the cameras would make our towns safer for citizens and police alike.
In the wake of several violent fatalities against citizens, we saw unarmed citizens shot, choked, and harassed. Still, as a society, we work to believe that most officers are good and that they strive to do their best, given often challenging circumstances and in moments where they have to make split-second decisions.
We know that sometimes video footage helps officers train and do better when faced with similar circumstances later in their careers or for future police candidates.
However, recently, Indiana, along with individual municipalities, has restricted citizens from filming officers doing their jobs by placing limits on how close citizens can be when filming. This reduces transparency and certainly regular audio quality, yet we're told that the body cameras will provide the pictures and audio for us, if they're turned on, of course.
Officers routinely tell citizens in 'audit videos' that they're filming for the citizens' safety and their own safety as well. Yet, the South Bend Common Council is preparing this week (Bill 43-25 Attached) to consider new rules about the handling of video footage, making it approximately $150 for citizens to get a copy of body camera footage. If there is more than one officer on the scene, the footage could cost even more.
This is footage that we as citizens have already paid for, both in purchasing the equipment and in the officers' salaries.
There are three points that I hope the Common Council considers:
1) How many requests (from non-media sources) are the police currently fulfilling per year for officer body-worn camera footage?
2) Why, as a community, can we not invest in appropriate AI to redact non-pertinent information and upload all body camera footage daily from each officer? Or, why can we not hire an outside group to handle the data and release it to citizens? Having the police record and arbitrate who gets to see the recordings is a serious conflict of interest at every turn.
3) Most importantly, from the Washington University Law Review in 2017 comes Laurent Sachararoff and Sarah Lustbader's well-thought-out piece that brings us to their abstract from their piece that can be seen here,
Imagine if police departments across the nation sought funding for a new program described as follows: “We propose a video surveillance program targeted toward heavily patrolled low-income neighborhoods of color in order to gather evidence of crimes such as drug possession, vandalism, and resisting arrest. We will primarily use this evidence to prosecute criminal cases against civilians—not police officers— withholding it from defendants to encourage pleas, and allowing access only to those who take the risk of going to trial. The public and the media will rarely, if ever, gain access to these videos, and we will release them at our unilateral discretion; we will, of course, own and control all the footage.” If this were the avowed purpose and description of a program, few would support it. Yet this is precisely how most police body camera programs are currently run.
Indeed, as a community, we would not want to make our judicial system even more complicated for citizens to be seen or heard. This kind of 'tax' on those interacting with the police makes it even less likely that citizens get to be heard, treated with fairness and dignity, or will attempt to redress any real or perceived malfeasance from a police force that is increasingly militaristic.
Bill 43-25
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