On his first day on the job in the Seattle Police Department, Mike Wagers was invited to an urgent meeting about transparency. It was July 28, 2014, little more than a week after Eric Garner was killed on Staten Island, less than two weeks before Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Mo., and police departments around the country were facing a new era of public scrutiny. Wagers, who has a Ph.D. in criminal justice from Rutgers, was the Seattle department’s new chief operating officer, a 42-year-old civilian in jeans and square-rimmed glasses. He’d left his wife and two kids in Virginia and come alone to Seattle, a city he didn’t know — where it rained but cultural norms, he’d read, didn’t allow you to use an umbrella — because the job was what he called “the chance of a lifetime.” Seattle was the first big-city police department in a decade to have come under what is known as a consent decree — police reform by federal fiat — after a string of violent police actions against black, Latino and Native American people were caught on camera in 2009 and 2010. Wagers and his new boss, Chief Kathleen O’Toole, herself just arrived in Seattle, would use the best new thinking and the best new technology to lead the turnaround. And then Wagers would go home.

O’Toole’s eighth-floor conference room, which has views of City Hall and Elliott Bay and the snow-capped Olympic Mountains, was packed with top police and city officials. All eyes were on a lawyer from the city attorney’s office named Mary Perry. A former naval officer in her 60s, Perry was small and soft-spoken and favored pearls, and she was the city’s unrivaled expert in the seemingly mundane intricacies of the state’s Public Records Act. She was briefing the room on the potential fallout from a landmark case she had just argued and lost before the Washington State Supreme Court. The case stemmed from a series of public-records requests by a reporter for the local television station KOMO, Tracy Vedder, who began filing them after the same high-profile incidents that would lead to the consent decree. She asked for user manuals to the department’s new system of in-car dashboard cameras, then for lists of dashcam recordings, then for some of the recordings themselves. After the department denied every one of them, Vedder sued it for violating the Public Records Act.

The act, which dates to 1972, when governments ran on paper and our modern torrent of electronic data was unimaginable, is one of the strongest in the country. Washington State agencies cannot deny requests for records because the requester is anonymous or the request is too broad, nor can they deny requests simply in order to protect an individual’s privacy; instead, agencies must redact only the details deemed sensitive under state code — for example, some addresses, sometimes the face of a minor — and disclose the rest. Before the court, Perry had argued that a different law, the state’s Privacy Act, which allows departments to withhold recordings until related criminal or civil cases are resolved, should take precedent and the Seattle Police should be allowed to broadly deny Vedder’s requests until the relevant statute of limitations ran out. The court disagreed.

As Perry now told Wagers and the officials gathered in the chief’s conference room, Seattle and other departments across the state were operating in a new reality. Only in cases under actual, pending litigation could the police withhold video footage from the people. This presented several problems. The first was logistical and financial: Seattle Police were sitting on more than 1.5 million individual dashcam and surveillance videos, or about 300,000 hours and 350 terabytes total. Before releasing any footage, someone in the department had to review and redact it in accordance with the specific privacy exemptions the state code did have. The process was manual, a painstaking, frame-by-frame ordeal. By one estimate, 169 people would have to work for a year just to fulfill the department’s existing video requests, and the department added 2,000 new video clips daily. Perry feared that the new flood of data, especially but not exclusively video, could bankrupt Seattle if someone requested it all. “It’s like being on the Titanic,” she later told me, “and you’ve got a teaspoon to bail.”