[Vision2020] Pullman police resolve massive records request

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of today's (December 13, 2014) Lewiston Tribune.

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Pullman police resolve massive records request
PULLMAN - A massive public records request that threatened to bog down the Pullman Police Department for years has been resolved through negotiations and about two weeks of work.
The request, submitted by an anonymous source in September, initially asked for copies of every patrol car dashboard camera and police officer body camera video the department had on file.
Public records officer Penni Reavis said the body camera videos alone amounted to more than 2,200 hours and about 1.7 terabytes of data.
"Our concern was that we were going to have to go through every video frame by frame, just to make sure there weren't any juveniles depicted, and to identify who everyone was," she said.
The department then planned to send written notification to everyone it could identify, letting them know about the request and giving them an opportunity to request an injunction.
"It was going to be a 20-year project," Reavis said.
The anonymous individual submitted similar records requests to police agencies around the state. After some of them were able to negotiate more limited responses, Reavis contacted the individual by email and offered to provide five unredacted videos.
"He responded right away and agreed," she said. "It turns out he had been impressed with Pullman and the concern we had (about protecting individual rights). We're so relieved. I can't tell you how much anxiety this caused."
Reavis spent two weeks going through various videos, looking for cases involving a single individual that resulted in a guilty plea or conviction and that aren't under appeal.
Most are college-age minor in possession, driving under the influence or warrant arrest cases, she said.
"Each video averages about 30 minutes," Reavis said. "They're pretty typical of the work we do. When I watch them, I'm really impressed with the demeanor of our officers. They really have a lot of patience."
The videos will be sent to the requester on Monday. He has indicated he plans to post them to YouTube.
A similar request to the Seattle Police Department reportedly prompted that agency to reconsider its plans to deploy body cameras for its officers, but Reavis said that was never a consideration in Pullman.
"It was too late," she said. "We were already looking at a 20-year project."

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Let me see now . . .

If the Moscow Police Department employs the use of body cameras, and . . .

If these videos could be copied onto 5-gigabyte DVDs . . . 

Submitting a public records request "for every body camera video ever created by every member of the Moscow Police Department" . . .

The material costs . . . at fifty cents per DVD would be approximate $200 . . . 

The labor costs . . . of the MPD admin staff . . . and the City of Moscow admin staff . . . per month . . . for the next twenty years . . . 

Hmmm.

Seeya 'round town, Moscow, because . . .

"Moscow Cares" (the most fun you can have with your pants on)
http://www.MoscowCares.com
  
Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho
 
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