Anonymous Seattle Police Video Requester Wants All of Obama’s Body Cams to Upload Straight to YouTube

Alex Garland

What if this Seattle police officer had a body cam and its recordings went straight to YouTube?

The anonymous programmer who has been politely terrorizing (and subsequently helping) the Seattle Police Department with body camera public records requests over the last three months has taken his cause to the White House. The programmer—a man in his 20s known mainly by his e-mail address, policevideorequests@gmail.com, and who wants to remain unidentified—has submitted an online “We the People” petition asking that President Obama’s new initiative to fund 50,000 police officers’ body cameras post all of the resulting footage on YouTube. "With faces blurred using Youtube's automatic face blurrer," the petition explains.

If this is the first time you’re hearing of policevideorequests@gmail.com, here’s a brief introduction to his work: Stemming from what he says was mere curiosity about Seattle body cam footage, the guy first filed dozens of massive records requests (PDRs) to the police department this past fall. The volume of the asks is pretty dang impressive; they included requests for all of the SPD’s in-car camera footage database, purchasing records for every bit of physical and digital technology the department owns, every single PDF/Word document/Powerpoint/Excel file/e-mail about the SPD’s body cameras, and—the masterpiece—every SPD e-mail sent about policevideorequests' video requests.

When the SPD balked at an opportunity for an early truce with their anonymous pain in the ass, policevideorequests turned up the dial on his PDRs. He built a program to fire off automated requests to the SPD every day at 9 a.m. And then, suddenly, policevideorequests started requesting far more than just material regarding police videos. He wanted every e-mail sent to and from the police department’s PDR address, all 911 calls from the previous day (every day), and audio files from every SPD radio channel in half-hour increments.

Eventually, the SPD settled on a deal with the man. The department would coordinate with policevideorequests to come up with an efficient way to properly redact and post more of their body cam videos online, and in exchange, he’d remove his cumbersome PDRs. (As a result, you can check out @policevideo’s friendly Twitter banter with SPD chief operating officer @MikeWagers.)

The goal of the PDRs, according to policevideorequests, was to make the SPD’s body cam initiative more transparent while maintaining privacy for people in the videos who hadn’t been convicted of a crime. The SPD will be hosting a hackathon towards this end on December 19. In the meantime, policevideorequests will be waiting to see whether his White House petition gathers enough traction in the next 30 days to garner an official response. If it reaches 100,000 signatures before 2015, the White House will have to start paying close attention to what’s happening in Seattle. (As of this writing, though, the number of signatures was in the single digits. Maybe body cam fan Bruce Harrell will give it a push?)