Between the lines, MPD’s body-cam study is kinda about redaction fees

A report estimates the cost of processing footage, but who will pay it?

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The Madison Police Department’s recently issued report on its body-camera pilot program is wishy-washy about a lot of things—whether bodycams will deliver on promises of increased transparency, impact the behavior of the police officers wearing them, or have much impact on public attitudes toward policing. Its 47 pages are fairly light on solid conclusions and quantifiable results. It does, however, get into a higher level of detail when it comes to the administrative costs of handling body-camera footage, including redacting footage to fulfill public-records requests.

While we continue our efforts to report on the implications of MPD’s push for body cameras, let us remember it is important to look at this report as, above all, a political document. A paid consultant for leading bodycam maker Axon conducted research for the report, as Tone Madison reported last week. And MPD has made no bones about the fact that it regards this report as a major part of its argument for the city to authorize and fund a department-wide bodycam program.

Don’t be surprised if you hear MPD citing this report to ask for another significant policy change: passing on more of the costs to people who seek body-camera footage under Wisconsin’s open-records laws. Act 253, a state law that took effect in spring 2024, allows law enforcement agencies to charge redaction fees when processing requests for video or audio material. It marks a major departure from the history of open-records law in Wisconsin, where courts have consistently ruled that statute doesn’t allow for redaction fees, though it allows for other kinds of fees. Act 253 also enables police to threaten records requesters with punitive fines of $10,000. 

Currently, MPD can’t yet charge redaction fees under Act 253, because City ordinance expressly forbids redaction fees. To remove that obstacle, MPD would need to convince the Madison Common Council to pass a resolution striking that provision from the City’s public records law. MPD Chief Shon Barnes has already expressed an interest in doing just that. As Tone Madison reported in June, MPD has consulted with the City Attorney’s office about potential changes to the ordinance, and MPD Chief Shon Barnes told District 2 Alder Juliana Bennett in a June 10 email: “We are indeed exploring these changes, however victims of crimes would be exempt from these fees. We have not completed this task, however with over 33,000 public records per year (and limited staff) we can no longer avoid these fees in some regard.”

The Common Council has yet to take up a resolution making this change, but it’s clear—not a matter of mere speculation—that Barnes would like to seek it. His response to Bennett frames redaction fees as a necessity, even an inevitability. Certain sections of the body-camera report offer further insight into how Barnes might make his case, from a financial standpoint.

Starting on page 10, the report specifically dials in on administrative costs related to public records requests, noting that “The BWC [body-worn camera] experiment provides the opportunity to evaluate public interest in viewing the videos through public records requests and additionally, to evaluate redaction capabilities of the video management software.” It goes on to provide some of the most detailed and specific numbers you’ll find anywhere in the report:

Between April 1, 2024 and October 1, 2024, the public records team received 321 requests for video searches: inclusive of all districts. The timeframe is inclusive of the experiment and several months after the conclusion of the experiment, when requests may occur. Public records requests may continue to be received, there is no time limit to request video.

Of these 321 requests 207 were requests for body camera recordings, excluding dash camera and CCTV records. Every request required staff time to research and locate appropriate files. On average the time per search is roughly 20 minutes per request. This means that staff spent roughly 70 hours searching for videos associated with these requests. This step of the process is completed by a team of 5 Information Clerks.

It eventually drills down to 66 of these requests that MPD says staff needed to review for potential redactions:

Of the 66 requests that went through the review process at least 34 of these requests were viewed in real time – if the video was twenty minutes in length, it was viewed for twenty minutes – to see if redactions were needed. 30 of these requests required redactions. These redactions required the real time viewing of 85 hours of video. When the redaction and administrative time is considered, the redactions require more than 180 hours of staff time. This work is done by a team of four (4) program assistants and the redactions are applied by two (2) lab technicians. This works out to approximately six (6) hours of staff time per request. The inclusion of BWC as a public record has an impact on staff and processing time.

Is all this building up to a request for more staff? Yes, of course it is. On page 34, MPD asks the City to add four new positions to support an eventual department-wide bodycam program:

A full implementation plan for BWC technology could not be realized without the addition of essential professional staff positions to assist with video processing, video redaction,and records, evidence and discovery processing. Moving forward with a full BWC implementation without adding support staff would severely impair the MPD’s ability to respond in a reasonable amount of time to requests for video. This includes requests from MPD officers and detectives investigating crimes, as well as requests from the public, the District Attorney’s Office, the Office of the Independent Monitor, and MPD’s Office of Professional Standards and Internal Affairs. MPD has provided staffing need projections in the past for a full implementation plan and these costs are consistent with past reports.

-Forensic Lab Technician $87,434,10
-Management Information Specialist 2 $87,434.10
-Program Assistant 1 $66,273.85
-Clerk Typist $51,077.43
Required Staffing Total $292,219.50

The report doesn’t break down how much of these costs might come from the City’s general fund, as opposed to outside grants, or whether these figures assume that MPD would generate some revenue via redaction fees. It does discuss the possibility of seeking federal, state, and private philanthropic grants to support the program. 

Staff hours are key when it comes to charging redaction fees. Act 253 allows police agencies to charge only for the “actual, necessary, and direct charge for staff time spent redacting,” specifying that the cost “shall be based on the pay rate of the authority’s lowest paid employee capable of performing the task.” There is some debate over what actually counts, under the law, as redacting time, as opposed to the time staff may spend reviewing footage. MPD is figuring it generously here, lumping all those tasks together. In a recent analysis of Act 253, attorney Tom Kamenick of the Wisconsin Transparency Project (who has been working with Tone Madison to help navigate the law), argues that it allows police to charge only for the time staff spends on actually making the redactions, not the time of reviewing a video for things that may need to be redacted. Rebutting a looser interpretation of the law from the Wisconsin Chiefs of Police Association (WCPA), Kamenick writes that it could lead to “absurd results, where law enforcement agencies that reviewed for 10 hours and redacted nothing could charge nothing, but if they redacted one second of footage, they could charge for 10 hours of work.”

The MPD report’s breakdown of these costs stands in stark contrast to its treatment of a whole other set of demands body cameras create: demands on the work time of the officers wearing them. The officers themselves have to spend time each shift uploading footage and tagging it for record-keeping purposes. This means officers either spend less time on other tasks, or run up more hours on the clock. (Body-camera vendors and body-cam proponents have argued that cameras create other efficiencies and cost savings that make up for this added work. They also push AI-driven tools, including Axon’s recently introduced Draft One software, as time-savers.) 

MPD’s latest annual report notes that it employs nearly 500 “commissioned personnel.” A majority of those personnel would be equipped with body cameras if the program goes department-wide. If each spends an hour each shift dealing with body-camera-related tasks, multiplied across all the shifts they work in a given week, multiplied across a whole year, the total cost in wages alone could dwarf the administrative-side costs of dealing with footage. But the report doesn’t actually offer a breakdown of the work hours officers in MPD’s North District spent on actual body-camera tasks during the pilot program. It collects some survey data about technical issues officers reported with the cameras, and a couple of anecdotes about added demands on their time, but doesn’t quantify this in a way comparable to the data it provides on the costs of processing open-records requests and staffing up on the administrative end.

What makes this gap even more remarkable is that the Madison Common Council specifically directed MPD to quantify all of the above. The resolution authorizing the pilot program spells out various details about the study’s design and the questions it needs to try and answer. It explicitly states that “officer time for tasks related to body-worn cameras during the pilot shall be recorded in work logs in order to gain a better understanding of the complete and true costs for Body-Worn Camera utilization.” If MPD kept those logs, the resulting data did not make it into the report.

Why does the report foreground one aspect of the costs and treat another aspect far more vaguely? Alders and members of the public should keep that question in mind when MPD points to the report to argue for desired policy outcomes.