YPD to charge up to $75 per hour for body camera footage under new state law

Yahoo

10-03-2025

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (WKBN) — City police will begin charging up to $75 per hour for anyone requesting body camera footage.
The overall cost they can charge will be capped at $750.
This is in response to a bill signed into law just after the first of the year by Ohio Mike DeWine that allows departments to charge for the footage if they want to.
Until the bill was introduced, body cam footage was free.
The law goes into effect April 2.
Backers of the bill who introduced it said the measure is not meant to deter people from obtaining footage or to prohibit transparency, but to address concerns that departments were devoting too many resources to redact footage for bloggers, YouTube channels and other reality-based mediums that rely on body cam footage for their content.
Lt. Brian Butler of the city police department said the department needs two people just to handle the requests for footage. Certain footage must be redacted before it can be released to the public.
Susan Gilles, Professor Emeritus John E. Sullivan Professor of Law at Capital University who specializes in media and public records law, said that the law is an example of what happens when something is rushed through at the last minute.
The law was not debated and was added at the last minute after a 17-hour session to approve House Bill 315 just after the first of the year.
Gilles said the state's public record laws already include a provision that limits can be set on material requested by someone who is making a profit, such as a blogger. That provision is not included in the new law, she said.
Also in 2019, the General Assembly decided that public records, including police videos, would be provided at no cost to the general public and media. The new law goes against that rationale, she said.
'The general assembly rejected the idea that the public should have to pay,' she said.
City Councilman and former police Chief Jimmy Hughes, D-2nd Ward, said he understands why such a law is needed because of how excessive requests could bog police down. However, he also added he believes city residents should be able to view footage at no cost.
City police began wearing body cameras in 2021 in the wake of police scrutiny following the unrest that resulted from the 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minn., at the hands of police.
The law also allows departments to charge the same fees for other videos, such as dashcam or security videos.
Butler referred other questions about the policy to the Law Department, but the person he referred a reporter to did not want to comment on the record. That person also did not know that departments have the option of not charging for body cam and other video footage.
After a request is made, an invoice will be prepared, Butler said. Work will not begin until the invoice is paid.
Gilles also said records, whether they are video or in another form, belong to the public, not the police department, and people should not be asked to pay for them.
Taxpayers already pay for the cameras, the system the footage is stored on and for officers to be trained to use the cameras.
The department's budget was $22,396,139 overall in 2024, according to the Finance Department. With 59,108 residents as of the last population count in 2023, the charge for police services per city resident is almost $379 at $378.901 per resident.
Youngstown is also the third poorest city in the state, with a poverty rate of 34.5 percent. Only Portsmouth at 35.4 percent and East Cleveland at 39.4 percent are higher.
Boardman police Chief Todd Werth, head of the second largest department in the area after Youngstown, said as of now, there are no plans to charge for videos, but he did say the matter is being studied with the Mahoning County Prosecutor's Office to see if a balance can be struck between a request by a citizen or a media outlet as opposed to someone who wants to post police videos for profit.
Werth said his department will receive requests from bloggers for videos that are time-consuming to redact, such as a blanket request for all police use of force videos for an entire year.
Also, Werth said some incidents have multiple officers present who have multiple cameras recording and all of that video has to be sifted through to be redacted if it is requested.
Gilles also said the process to release the video if a department charges for it can be time-consuming. They have up to five days to figure out how much to charge and the video does not have to be edited until payment is made. That can delay the release of the video, which goes against the spirit of the public records law that says that records should be given in a reasonable period of time.
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