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State lawmakers understandably want to protect the privacy of witnesses and victims who appear in video images captured by police body cameras.

But Wisconsin’s open records law already does that. When a citizen asks a police agency to release footage from a police uniform camera, police can balance the public interest in seeing those images against the harm that might result to individuals involved. Police can blur or edit out certain parts of the video, similar to what they can do with paper records.

And then, if the person requesting the video doesn’t agree with a police agency’s decision not to release part or all of what was filmed, that citizen can ask a judge to review that decision.

This system has worked well for government documents of all sorts, including cameras mounted on the dashboards of police cars.

But with more and more police agencies putting cameras on the uniforms of officers, more and more images of sensitive situations are being recorded. Police agencies are understandably nervous about what to release and what to restrict.

So providing law enforcement with guidance from the state makes sense. So does requiring training.