I attended the forum sponsored by the City of Greensboro on body-worn police cameras. So did N&R ed page editor Allen Johnson, who writes:

If I were to sum up the most important takeaway from this week’s superb panel on police videos, it is the sheer backwardness of the city’s approach to the technology. At least so far.

We rolled out the technology without a clear policy on who gets to see the video.

We held the first public discussion about that question more than a year after the cameras were deployed.

And, most important, we built access to the footage based on a totally backward hierarchy: the police came first and the general public came last, if at all.

Note who responds to Johnson’s post —-none other than former Greensboro Police Chief Ken Miller, who is now chief down in Greenville S.C.

Miller writes:

The GPD policy on release of information actually follows the law of North Carolina, despite N&R attempts to characterize it to the contrary. The N&R would have GPD violate the law to serve its own prurient interests.

3. Until the law of North Carolina is changed, it restricts the release of personnel or criminal investigative records except under certain conditions….

While the panel did a good job of probing the many unknowns —including the lack of case law regarding videos as public records —-their bottom line was Gboro will linger in a legal no man’s land until state law is clarified. And good luck with that, at least any time soon.

NYT also probed the issue, in the process raising many more questions:

But the spread of police body cameras is also raising concerns about what is recorded, when and how video might be released to the public, and how the millions of hours of video will be archived and protected from leaks and hackers. Some police unions worry that videos could become tools of management, used by higher-ups to punish an officer they do not like, or that private conversations among officers could go public.

The rising use of cameras has put the police in a complex and uncertain landscape of public records law.

To say the least.