A judge has slapped down a Colorado police department’s attempt to charge a media organization $1,000 a minute for bodycam footage.
The ruling supports arguments made by lawyers for Yellow Scene Magazine and Jeannette Orozco, whose 51-year-old mother, Jeanette Alatorre, was shot and killed by Boulder Police Department officers in 2023.
Boulder County District Court Judge Robert Gunning issued an order saying “[t]here is no language providing that payment of fees is a prerequisite to the release of BWC [body worn camera] footage.”
The judge rejected Boulder PD’s argument it could charge for the footage, as the Colorado Criminal Justice Records Act (CCJRA) allows law enforcement agencies to impose “reasonable fees, not to exceed actual costs” for the search, retrieval and redaction of records.
Gunning said the CCJRA only allows fees for criminal justice records “requested pursuant to” that particular statute, and a law enforcement agency “is without authority to impose a fee when, as here, a request for BWC footage is made under the Integrity Act.”
The plaintiffs requested the footage under Colorado’s Law Enforcement Integrity Act (LEIA) — not the CCJRA — enacted in 2020 following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. They argued the LEIA contained no language authorizing Boulder to charge fees for unedited body-cam footage of incidents “in which there is a complaint of peace officer misconduct.”
“Had the legislature intended for law enforcement agencies to charge a research or retrieval fee in response to an Integrity Act request for BWC footage, it easily could have included such a provision in the Integrity Act,” Gunning wrote.
The legislature could have cross-referenced CCJRA’s fee provision in the Integrity Act, he added, or it could have amended CCJRA to say that CCJRA’s fee provision also applies to requests for body-cam footage made under the Integrity Act.
The two statutes “operate independently of each other,” the judge concluded, also noting that “the imposition of significant fees as a predicate for public release thwarts” the objective of the Integrity Act “to enhance integrity, transparency, and accountability in policing.”
Under the LEIA, all unedited video and audio recordings of incidents “in which there is a complaint of peace officer misconduct … through notice to the law enforcement agency involved in the alleged misconduct” must be released to the public no later than 21 days after a request is made.
Redactions are allowed if a video “raises substantial privacy concerns” for criminal defendants, victims, witnesses, juveniles or informants. This could include video depicting nudity, a sexual assault, a mental health crisis, a medical emergency or a “significantly explicit and gruesome bodily injury, unless the injury was caused by a peace officer.”
In April, Yellow Scene Magazine sued the Boulder PD over its insistence that the news organization pay the city thousands of dollars to obtain video of the 2023 fatal shooting of Alatorre by officers near the North Boulder Recreation Center. Officers say Alatorre appeared to pull a gun out of her purse before shooting her. The gun was later determined to be a replica of a pistol.
