Less than two months after an Akron police officer shot her 15-year-old son in the back on Thanksgiving night, Ashley Green said a controversial new law that would allow Ohio police departments to charge up to $750 to release body-camera footage is “a slap in our face.”
Green, the mother of Jazmir Tucker, joined her family’s attorneys and others whose loved ones were killed by police to speak out against a provision of a bill quietly signed into law earlier this year by Gov. Mike DeWine.
HB 315 allows law enforcement agencies to charge $75 per hour, up to $750 total, to process and release videos from body-worn cameras, police car dash cameras and jail surveillance videos. Those videos are considered public records and many agencies provide them in response to public records requests at no cost – like the Akron Police Department does currently – or for little cost.
In a statement after the bill was signed into law with no public hearings, DeWine said he wanted to avoid a hypothetical scenario where an overworked law enforcement agency diverted resources for officers on the street and moved them to administrative tasks in order to process and redact videos…