KOMO Vs. SPD: Thousands of Lost Dash Cam Videos, Some "Very Complicated Stuff"
If your eyes were wandering from your RSS reader yesterday, you may have missed local news station KOMO rolling up their sleeves and getting into some advocacy. Monday afternoon, the station sued the Seattle Police Department over refusal to release department records -- specifically, KOMO has been trying for over a year to gain access to the department's archive of dashcam videos. Last night, KOMO reported that SPD has apparently lost over 45,000 of them over the past three years.
How severe is this loss? It's a huge chunk of their archive. KOMO says that one month in 2008, "more than 14,000 videos disappeared in less than two days...that represented about 22 percent of all videos in the system at the time." These numbers apply to video specifically tagged for retention, not routine dashcam videos deleted by SPD.
If nobody with a camera phone is handy, as KOMO reminds us, often dashcam video is the one thing that can settle a matter of a suspect's word against an officer's. Dashcam video was certainly also a large factor in telling the story in the John T. Williams case, when the suspect could not respond.
According to the department, "efforts" have been made to recover the stolen video. The King County Prosecutor's office and the county's public defender agencies said they were never notified of a large video loss. Although none have come forward for sure, the video loss has the potential to compromise cases they work with. KOMO has published a spreadsheet of the missing video just in case.
As Hanna pointed out in Extra, Extra last night, this does not bode well with a department that has already been heavily criticized for lack of transparency. This has a potential to essentially shove a wedge between the ever-widening rift between SPD and many Seattle residents spurred by a pattern of violent local policework.
Sgt. Ian Whitcomb assures KOMO that public records are "very complicated stuff" and that the department "wants to follow the law."
In their lawsuit, KOMO, which is owned by Fisher Communications, cites seven violations of the Public Records Act. Beginning in August 2010, KOMO says they made several requests for archives of dashcam videos, starting with all video from January 2005 to present, and even broadened the request to a single retention report made after January of 2009. Each time, the suit alleges, SPD said the records were not available. KOMO calls bullshit based on how the dashcams work, a partial list of retained videos from SPD's counsel, and a few other incidents. The curious can read the lawsuit for themselves here.
KOMO has been staggering what details it releases -- this development was a teaser for the evening's broadcast when news of the lawsuit originally broke yesterday morning. We'll let you know more as they reveal more info and as the story develops.
