Tumwater council establishes fee for body camera footage requests 

The Tumwater City Council adopted a resolution to establish a fee structure for charging nonexempt public disclosure requests for body-worn camera footage. 

The council made the decision during a meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 20. 

Tumwater Police Deartment Chief Carlos Quiles said the law enforcement agency is establishing the fee to offset the cost of time and labor needed to redact sensitive and private information from footage.

The amount of staff time needed to process the footage has been increasing due to the number of requests for body-worn camera footage. 

As of early October, the department has received 127 public disclosure requests, 92 percent of which were for body-worn camera footage. 

The volume has resulted in the department taking up to three and a half days to process requests on average. Before body-worn cameras, Quiles said the department normally closed public disclosure requests in less than a day. 

Quiles said individuals directly involved in the recorded footage and their legal representatives are exempt from the fees.  

As an example, Quiles said individuals who are not exempt include social media conten creators who request the footage. 

Nonexempt requesters will have to pay a rate of $0.89 per minute of the video. 

The police department landed on the the rate by factoring in the salary and benefits of the lowest paid police services specialist, a position that works on video redactions; the average minutes worked by the staff per month; and the monthly license fee of a tool used for redaction. 

Nonexempt requesters will have to pay an initial deposit, which is calculated by 10 percent of the estimated cost of redaction time multiplied by the base rate. The estimated cost of redaction time is two minutes per one minute of actual video. 

Police Records Supervisor Ashleigh Clark noted Olympia charges less with $0.75, but noted the city has different wage rates and opted out of the software that Tumwater is using. Lacey charges $0.90 per minute.