After a spate of enforcement scandals that raised the ire of many in Los Angeles, bodycams began to catch on as a policy measure that could shield police from wrongful litigation and protect citizens from civil rights abuses.

But with continued nationwide unrest surrounding police misconduct — culminating in presidential candidate Hillary Clinton voicing support for nationwide body cameras — the significance of California’s approach to the technology took on an increased importance.

Controversial legislation

In an effort to tip the balance of the bodycam advantage less in favor of police, Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, introduced AB 66, a bill intended to limit police access to material videotaped on their own bodycams.

“By a 5 to 1 vote, the Assembly Public Safety Committee approved AB 66, which includes the controversial provision that prohibits police officers from viewing body camera footage before writing their reports,” U-T San Diego noted. According to Weber and the civil libertarians supporting her proposal, the importance of keeping bodycam evidence under wraps outweighs the inconvenience police will face as a result.

But, as NPR reported, “many law enforcement groups aren’t buying that. They have rallied in opposition to the measure, saying it that would undermine accurate police reports — and that it presumes that the police will lie.”

Interviewed previously by U-T San Diego, “Weber said the primary role of body cameras is to de-escalate incidents between police and the general public, not to serve as a reference for officers as they write reports.”

A rival workaround

While Sacramento and law enforcement debate the bill, California’s ACLU chapter has taken matters into their own hands. A new app created by the group, called “Mobile Justice CA,” gave users the ability to “record cell phone videos of possible cases of police misconduct and then quickly save the footage to the organization’s computer servers,” as Reuters reported. “The California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union said the app will send the video to the organization and preserve it even if a phone is seized by police or destroyed.”

Mobile Justice CA will even push an alert to nearby users’ phones, allowing them to seek out the location of the possible misconduct and observe the situation firsthand.

Municipal disagreement

The city of Los Angeles, which pioneered the gradual introduction of bodycams into a troubled metropolitan environment, also took fresh steps to implement a more formal regime regulating the way the devices are used.

The L.A. Police Commission recently voted to codify new rules covering bodycams, but not without a fight. As CBS Los Angeles reported, “Commissioner Robert Saltzman cast the lone dissenting vote after an often-contentious debate that lasted nearly two hours, saying he was ‘frustrated’ that commissioners and the public were not able to view and comment on the policies before the LAPD reached an agreement with the police officers’ union.”

But Commission President Steve Soboroff, an early and vocal supporter of the cameras, “argued that the public has had many opportunities to give input and that the commission will have the opportunity to re-assess the policies once the officers have actually put the body cameras to use.”

Election-year politics

Adding a final layer of complexity to the clash of interests around body cameras, state Attorney General Kamala Harris, currently angling to replace outgoing Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Ca., has vowed to equip special agents employed by the state Department of Justice with bodycameras of their own. “With increased focus on allegations of racial bias and police violence across the country, Harris earlier this year directed her division of law enforcement to review the Justice Department’s own special agent training on implicit bias and use of force,” the Sacramento Bee noted.

Senate Bill 411, introduced by state Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, protects the practice so long as active bystanders are “not interfering with official duties,” the Los Angeles Times noted.

According to the bill’s language, “the fact that a person takes a photograph or makes an audio or video recording of an executive officer, while the officer is in a public place or the person taking the photograph or making the recording is in a place he or she has the right to be, is not, in and of itself, a violation[.]”

What’s more, Lara’s bill set out that photographing or videotaping police in that matter would not “constitute reasonable suspicion to detain the person or probable cause to arrest the person.”

Setting a trend

Passing 31-3 in the state Senate, SB411 headed to the Assembly, setting up California to become a possible trendsetter in the way citizen monitoring of police could be treated. Currently, no national consensus has formed around the issue, leaving legislative momentum up for grabs at the state level.

Although settled constitutional law has recognized both a right to videotape and a right to prevent interference with policing, widespread departures from that standard have prompted state lawmakers to intervene. In Colorado, for instance, a recent bill “proposed making it a crime for police to stop citizens from filming,” as the Daily Beast observed.

But, across the country, pieces of legislation have run into trouble regardless of which side of the debate they favor. In Connecticut, for instance, a bill permitting “lawsuits against police officers who interfere with those photographing or videotaping them during the performance of their duties was blocked Monday by Republicans in the judiciary committee,” according to the Hartford Courant.

In Texas, meanwhile, a police-friendly “cop-watcher” bill drew fire from legal observers, journalists, gun owners and others:

Dallas-area House representative Jason Villalba introduced HB 2918, which would make it a misdemeanor to photograph police within 25 feet — raising serious concerns that the bill, if passed, would violate the First Amendment and prevent individuals from holding police accountable. For Texans legally carrying a firearm, the buffer zone required would be 100 feet under Villalba’s proposal.

Halting progress

As Calwatchdog.com previously reported, Sacramento has labored to keep up with changing technology, police tactics and public opinion. In January, several Democratic lawmakers introduced legislation around the use of on-cop bodycams. By videotaping situations police entered into, the logic ran, misconduct would decrease at the same time that police gained clear evidence of proper conduct that could help prevent lawsuits or help resolve them to the departments’ benefit.

Attorney General Kamala Harris, for her part, has long considered police abuses to be an important part of her political and legal agenda — a stance that could gain prominence as her bid to replace Sen. Barbara Boxer draws more potent challengers.

Despite widespread support for bodycams among Democrats, along with many libertarians and some Republicans, the policy has attracted its share of problems. In Los Angeles, where Democratic Mayor Eric Garcetti blazed a path toward standardizing the equipment, concern has persisted over the use of cloud storage, as Southern California Public Radio reported:

“Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti will present this month his proposed city budget for the coming year. It’s expected to include money for body cameras for all Los Angeles Police Department officers. But some security analysts argue the LAPD’s plan to store body camera video in the cloud could make the images more vulnerable to attack than if the department placed them on its local servers.”

As yet, the question of cloud storage for recordings of police has not yet threatened to stall the progress of SB411  in Sacramento.