The New York Police Department tried to charge a local television news station $36,000 to view bodycam footage, prompting the station to sue the NYPD under the state\u2019s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL).<\/p>\n
Courtney Gross, a reporter for cable station NY1, sent a FOIL request to the NYPD last April for 190 hours of unedited body-cam footage. The police department responded by saying that it could only provide the station with redacted footage, and even that would cost them $36,000.<\/p>\n
Now the network is suing the police department in New York state court, saying that such a price was \u201cexcessive\u201d<\/em> and \u201ceffectively bars public access to information that FOIL is intended to guarantee\u201d<\/em> according to\u00a0the suit<\/a> filed in the Manhattan Supreme Court.<\/p>\n “Access to such information should not be thwarted by shrouding it with the cloak of secrecy or confidentiality,”<\/em> NY1 said in the lawsuit.<\/p>\n The NYPD, however, defended the $36,000 charge in a September letter to the network. It argued that the steep price tag was a result of the costs of paying someone to view, edit and process the footage, which would take an estimated 304 hours.<\/p>\n \u201cThe lowest paid NYPD employee with the skills required to prepare a redacted copy of the recordings is in the rank of police officer, and the cost of compensating a police officer is $120.00 per hour,\u201d<\/em> the letter said. \u201cMultiplying $120.00 by 304 hours equals $36,480, which closely approximates the amount estimated by the [records access officer].\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n It isn\u2019t clear where the NYPD took such figures from, since a $120-an-hour wage \u00a0would add up to a yearly income of about $250,000 a year for a 40-hour workweek \u2014 an amount far exceeding the salary of an average NYPD officer.<\/p>\n Gross argued that the purpose of the fee is to throw \u201ca cloak of secrecy\u201d<\/em> over recorded police activity, and undercuts the purpose of FOIL, which is \u201cto foster transparency and trust between government and the citizenry.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The lawsuit comes at a time when body cameras are becoming more and more common items for officers around the country in an attempt to hold police departments accountable for abuses of authority.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Via RT<\/a>. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The New York Police Department tried to charge a local television news station $36,000 to view bodycam footage, prompting the station to sue the NYPD under the state\u2019s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL). Courtney Gross, a reporter for cable station NY1, sent a FOIL request to the NYPD last April for 190 hours of unedited […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":217330,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-217329","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217329\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}