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Last week, a California appellate court ruled that video footage from police drones collected in response to 911 calls will not be routinely exempt from public record. The choice by the California Court of Appeal for the Fourth District got here in a response to a journalist’s try and gain access to drone footage taken as a part of the Chula Vista Police Department’s “Drones as First Responders” program, the primary of its kind within the nation.
After the journalist, Arturo Castañares of La Prensa, sued the department, the trial court ruled that Chula Vista police could withhold all footage since the videos were exempt from disclosure as law enforcement investigatory records under the California Public Records Act, resulting in an appeal.
The appellate court held that drone footage was not categorically exempt from public disclosure, as drones is perhaps used to answer non-crime events that also warranted a 911 call (for instance, a mountain lion roaming a residential street). Once they sent the choice back to trial court, they suggested that every individual video must be examined as as to whether a criminal offense actually occurred, after which the videos could possibly be released to the general public following the CPRA on a case-to-case basis.
This case serves to point out the problem of integrating recent technologies into existing reporting mechanisms, requiring California police departments excited by DFR programs to sort through their very own footage to make the video of non-criminal 911 responses publicly available. Nonetheless, the choice was welcomed by many privacy advocates, who argued that the police drone footage must be subject to the purview of civilian oversight, like other records generated by law enforcement.
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