As part of NY1's look last month at the city's body camera program for police, the station requested a look at footage from the program – but the NYPD said no. NY1's Courtney Gross filed the following report.



The NYPD is in the process of rolling out its body camera program to potentially thousands of officers, but officials are keeping the footage close to their vest.

Some six months ago, we filed a Freedom of Information Law request, known as a FOIL, with the NYPD. We wanted to review five weeks of unedited video footage from its body camera program. Still in its pilot phase, some 54 officers across six precincts are wearing cameras.



Initially, the NYPD rejected our request for unedited video, claiming privacy. They wanted to charge us $36,000 for edited video.



We appealed that decision, and now, in a five-page response, the NYPD is once again saying no to handing that unedited footage over.

In part, One Police Plaza says an agency does not have to engage in a blanket, indiscriminate disclosure of its records.



It says their cameras have captured video exempt from the state's disclosure law, like footage that depicts an officer seeking advice from a colleague, or video showing a victim of a sex crime, as well as footage that shows an officer engaging in "purely private behavior."



The NYPD says in order to redact these private interactions, a police officer has to review about 200 hours of footage and, they claim, spend 114 hours redacting it, ultimately giving us a slice of the footage at a cost that they say is more than $36,000.



The state's public disclosure law prohibits an agency from charging a requestor to locate and review any public record.



Either way, Police Commissioner William Bratton has made it clear: he is not interested in giving the public access to the video recorded by his officers.



"The position that the department is taking, I would take at this juncture, we have never released 911 calls, and video recorded by these officers, I think would be under the same protection of not being released, even to FOIL requests," Bratton said on September 2.