A divided state Supreme Court ruled Monday that private citizens are not entitled to see police dashboard camera recordings and other footage of officers conducting traffic stops, arrests, and other police activities where no lethal force was involved.

A divided state Supreme Court ruled Monday that private citizens are not entitled under the Open Public Records Act to see police dashboard camera recordings and other footage of officers conducting traffic stops, arrests and other police activities where no lethal force was involved.

The 4-3 ruling found that in the absence of a law or directive from the state attorney general mandating that the recordings be made, they aren't subject to disclosure.

The case stemmed from a lawsuit by John Paff, a leading public records advocate in New Jersey, against the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office seeking video of a 2014 traffic stop in Barnegat. In that stop, a Tuckerton police officer who made the stop was accused of siccing his police dog on a female motorist.

The officer, Justin M. Cherry, was indicted but later had the charges dropped on procedural matters.

Although the police chief in that instance had issued an order requiring officers to have their dashcams operating at all times, a majority of the court found that a police chief's directive does not carry the same force of law as a directive from the state attorney general, and thus does not constitute a public entitlement to see the evidence resulting from that directive.

Paff disagreed with that reasoning, which he called "arbitrary," and said a directive to a police officer from his or her immediate supervisor has just as much weight for that officer as a directive that comes from higher up the chain of command. Additionally, he said, most attorney general directives are just that -- directives issued in the absence of any formal legal process being followed.

In most cases, he said, "It's not as if the attorney general went through an official rule-making process with public hearings and the like, so what's the difference?"

Monday's state Supreme Court decision overturns a ruling issued earlier this year by a divided state appellate court, which upheld a lower court ruling that said the public has a right to see footage from police video cameras. It also comes a year after the state Supreme Court ruled that video footage of deadly police shootings should be released.

In reaching its conclusion, the court confined its analysis to the specific provisions of the Open Public Records Act but still left open the possibility that the video could be released under a separate legal principle known as the Common Law Right of Access, which requires a balancing test between the government's interest in keeping records sealed and the public's interest in seeing those records.

The court thus remanded the case to the trial court in Ocean County, where it will be up to the court to make that determination.

Paff said Monday that he was confident he would win that case since the Tuckerton Police Department had already furnished a copy of the footage as part of the court proceedings, from which it was later obtained and publicized by the Asbury Park Press newspaper.

"I don't know how they're going to argue that they have some great interest in confidentiality in a video that's already been made public," Paff said.

However, he noted that unlike with lawsuits filed under the Open Public Records Act, which entitles prevailing plaintiffs to a reimbursement of their attorney fees, those who prevail under the Common Law Right of Access are entitled to no such reimbursement. As a result, Paff suggested it would now become harder for members of the public without the means to finance a lawsuit to obtain such records.

"The entire point of these videos is to enable the public to detect police misconduct and, just as importantly, to be able to call out as liars those who make false accusations against the police who are trying to do their job," he said.

In the case of police officers accused of meting out street justice or acting improperly, the public now will be limited to knowing whatever the government allows them to know, he said.

"It's a trashing of the public's right to know to have prosecutors say, 'We reviewed the tape and found no misconduct, but you can't see it,'?" Paff said. "We know that police and prosecutors, being human, sometimes lie -- and it's never been the tradition in this country to just have government give you an explanation and not allow the public to see the evidence."

It was precisely such video evidence that led three years ago to the removal of a Newton police officer, Jason Miller, after he was accused of exposing himself to motorists during traffic stops he had made over the previous year.

Newton Police Chief Michael Richards said Monday that he acknowledges the public's interest in having access to such footage, and that police departments shouldn't be able to "have it both ways" by only releasing footage when it exonerates officers while refusing to do so when it may implicate misconduct.

However, being compelled to do so while an investigation is in progress could hamper the investigation or even interfere with a suspect's ability to receive a fair trial, he said.

Paff responded that the OPRA law already provides exceptions for when an active investigation is in progress, and also allows for other exceptions such as those where legitimate privacy concerns are at stake -- as, for example, in the case of footage depicting a rape or violent crime victim.

Still, he said, the default policy shouldn't be an automatic denial of the public's right to see any and all footage, as appears to be the case following Monday's court ruling.

Associate Justice Barry Albin, in a dissenting opinion, wrote that as a result of Monday's decision, "the operations of our government will be less transparent and our citizenry less informed, which may lead to greater misunderstanding and more distrust between the public and the police ... That is not in keeping with a statute that calls itself the Open Public Records Act."

Monday's court ruling leaves open the possibility that Attorney General Gurbir Grewal could issue a directive requiring the release of all police video recordings, as he did earlier this year in ordering the release of most police shooting videos within 20 days of an incident.

However, with Grewal's office siding with the Ocean County prosecutor in this case, such a directive appears unlikely.

Paff, in addition to being a longtime board member of the New Jersey Foundation for Open Government, also chairs the New Jersey Libertarian Party's Open Government Advocacy Project.