NJ Police Body Camera Bill Unanimously Passed By Assembly

NEW JERSEY — A bill that would allow law enforcement officers in New Jersey to review body camera footage before writing police reports cleared the Assembly at a recent voting session.

Assemblymembers approved the bill unanimously at the Dec. 20 voting session — two members abstained — which followed months of debate, and even a conditional veto in November by Gov. Phil Murphy.

In short, the measure would allow police to review their body camera footage before writing police reports. Currently, police cannot review body camera footage at all before filing reports. This bill will reverse that.

Supporters of the bill say that officers would be able to write more accurate reports, while detractors say it would enable those same officers to exclude pieces of the interaction that don't appear on video.

American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey Policy Director Sarah Fajardo told NJ Spotlight News that she believed there are no circumstances when officers should be able to review the footage prior to filing reports.

"It undermines civil rights, it undermines best practices for policing that are researched fact. There's science out there that tells us how memory operates, and once you introduce new information into one's memory it changes," she told Spotlight News.

New Jersey State Policemen’s Benevolent Association President Pat Colligan offered a different take on giving police officers new information before writing reports to the New Jersey Globe.

"We want the best incident report that can possibly be written. Memory is a volatile resource. Video is not," he said.

Murphy, even as he issued the conditional veto, said he believed there were instances when police officers should be able to review video. However, he did offer recommendations that he believed should be added.

Those recommendations stated that footage would remain disallowed prior to a written report in the case that:

"an encounter about which a complaint has been verbally expressed or formally registered; the use of any police force; the discharge of a firearm by a law enforcement officer; the death of a person while in police custody; and an incident that is the subject of an internal affairs complaint relating to the use of force, bias, or dishonesty.

The recommendation also added that, if an officer did review the footage prior to writing the report, that they state that within the writing.

The full bill can be viewed here.