Police body cams have become all the rage in the wake of last year's police shooting of an unarmed African-American teen in Ferguson, Missouri. It's a technological method to hold the police and public accountable. It's also a solution supported by President Barack Obama and one benefitting the bottom line of Taser, a body cam maker selling its wares like hotcakes.

If a lawmaker from Minnesota has his way, footage captured by those cameras in that state would not be a public record, as it is now, and instead would remain classified—and likely destroyed.

"You could have a half-naked housewife that's been beat up with a bloody face, half-naked kids running around," Rep. Tony Cornish, a Republican, told Minnesota Public Radio about his proposal. "You could have a gun collection. That information needs to remain private."

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In short, Cornish said, it's about protecting the public's privacy. "You aren't going to have huge amounts of footage of innocent people, put into storage or a hard drive and allow people to walk in and get it."

The proposed legislation by the House Public Safety Committee chairman is meeting resistance by media and civil liberties groups. All the while, the measure highlights a burgeoning debate about police-public privacy as law enforcement begins embracing body cams.

Cornish's offering comes more than a week after a local New Jersey newspaper published the dash cam footage of police officers killing a passenger during a routine traffic stop, footage the South Jersey Times obtained only after a public records request. The video shows officers shooting 36-year-old passenger Jerame Reid. The Bridgeton Police Department chief Michael Gaimari wasn't pleased that he had to hand over the tape based on an Open Public Records Act demand from the newspaper. He said the department does not "consider the posting of any such video as compassionate or professional." The family attorney for the dead man, Conrad Benedetto, said the video "raises serious questions" about the shooting.

The Minnesota proposal, however, does not outright ban the release of body cam recordings. According to the measure's text:

...audio and video data captured by a portable video recording system that is not part of an active or inactive criminal investigation must be destroyed within 90 days of the date the data were captured, unless the data subject, or any peace officer identifiable by the data, submits a written request to the law enforcement agency to retain the data for possible use in a future proceeding related to the circumstances under which the data were originally collected. Any law enforcement agency that receives a request to retain data shall retain it for a reasonable time, based upon the likelihood of its future use and the agency's policies for retention. Peace officers who are identifiable by portable video recording system data shall have unrestricted access to the data while it is retained and must be permitted to make copies.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Minnesota Newspaper Association object to the measure.

"Our concern is that if you make it too private, the whole idea that we are able to use the body cameras to watch the police, to turn this around and say this is surveillance of law enforcement, really falls by the wayside," Ben Feist, an ACLU lobbyist, said.