Caption: Captured on bodycam footage, State and County officers respond to a Monroe County buggy crash, spring 2023
In the pre-dawn hours between December 19 and 20, Ohio legislators attached a consequential rider to a bill, establishing fees ranging from $75 to $750 for body camera footage requests. The governor has not signed the legislation, but its inclusion in the larger bill is alarmingly close to becoming law.
“As a society, we give police the power to shoot, injure and potentially kill us,” observed Gary Daniels, chief lobbyist for Ohio’s ACLU chapter. “What this language does is it allows them to hide behind the law that is going to be cost-prohibitive for someone to get videos they want… This was quite literally, snuck in, on purpose, at the last minute… There’s no reason to do that, other than you want to absolutely avoid having it out there in the open, where people can come to the Statehouse and advocate for it or against it.”
Ohio’s Public Records Act is a critical tool for keeping public offices accountable. My experiences with police offices delivering records has been positive. However, not all records requests produced the information I thought I might find, and with few exceptions, offices are not charged with offering me research assistance. As such, the proposed changes are concerning. Consider two cases involving Swartzentruber Amish individuals, where fees could have been erected to discourage investigation.
In Ashland County, officers stopped a young man returning from court—where he had just attended a hearing about yellow flashing light violations—only to cite him again for the same offense. Officers impounded his horse and buggy, though the sheriff later rescinded the citation and returned his property. The footage revealed concerning patterns of religious targeting and the officers’ antagonistic stance toward the buggy driver.
In Monroe County, footage captured a telling sequence after a car rear-ended a buggy in broad daylight. While county officers initially declined to cite the buggy driver, a State lieutenant—known for previously citing Swartzentruber Amish—pressured them to issue citations not only for missing the yellow flashing light but also for child endangerment. The recording exposed his explicit encouragement of targeting local Swartzentruber Amish.
In both cases, this footage was important to parties moving forward with a challenge to Ohio’s yellow flashing light law, as written about in two previous posts.
Responding to public records requests stands as a fundamental duty of public offices, not an ancillary burden. While legislators point to social media profiteers and departmental workloads to justify these fees, their argument falters under scrutiny. Data collection companies regularly harvest and monetize records from election offices, mapping departments, and school districts—yet face no similar barriers. The selective application of these fees not only contradicts the Ohio Public Records Act’s intentional neutrality regarding records usage but also sidesteps more constructive solutions: dedicated records staff, modernized management systems, and proactive online publishing that eliminates the need for individual requests.
The path forward lies not in erecting financial barriers but in embracing transparency. Public offices should lead by transforming reactive disclosure into proactive sharing such as, for example, in making records readily available online. Those who persist in requesting public records—whether journalists, researchers, or concerned citizens—serve as custodians of public accountability, preserving our access to knowledge. Their efforts merit our gratitude, not our obstacles.
