Earlier this month a bill in the North Carolina state legislature to prevent the police from releasing body and dashboard video passed a House committee. Currently making its way through State Supreme Court in Manhattan is a lawsuit by the Time Warner Cable television channel NY1 against the Police Department, for failing to produce five weeks of footage from its body camera pilot program, which began late in 2014.

Image A body camera. Credit... Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters

In April of last year, a reporter for NY1 requested the footage through the state’s Freedom of Information Law, but was denied by the Police Department’s records access office, on the grounds that the department itself had not reviewed the footage and could not offer a redacted sampling, which would remove any images that might violate the privacy of victims or bystanders. The department would turn over the footage, however, for a fee of $36,000, representing the estimated cost of the labor required to examine the digital images and locate and copy those that it could make available. Lawyers for NY1 argue that the demand has no basis in the Freedom of Information Law and effectively bars public access to footage “whose entire purpose is to subject the N.Y.P.D.’s actions to public supervision,” as their petition put it.

As the lead lawyer for NY1, Saul Shapiro, remarked in court two weeks ago, the body camera program was a voluntary initiative by the Police Department, and it would have to live with the consequences of a plan it chose to devise. The presiding judge, Justice Kathryn E. Freed, seemed almost bewildered by the city’s resistance, pointing out more than once that the department’s unwillingness to make the footage easily available seemed to undercut the entire premise of transparency, on which the program was based.

Lawyers for the news organization had also pointed out that there were modern technologies available to make the task of redaction cheaper. In a letter to the judge following the hearing, city lawyers countered that the court had no authority to force the Police Department to adapt such technologies, which was like hearing someone say that although he was fully committed to losing 20 pounds, no one was going to tell him to eat less and to go to spin class.

The case is not the only one casting doubt on the city’s commitment to transparency on the part of the police. About the same moment that Mr. Bratton was complaining about cellphone videos, the city filed a brief in a suit brought against it by the Legal Aid Society seeking a summary of prior, substantiated complaints filed with the Civilian Complaint Review Board against Daniel Pantaleo, the police officer whose illegal chokehold resulted in Eric Garner’s death. We still know almost nothing about him.