At first impression, video files might seem less complicated for public records requests than, for example, large paper files with a mix of document types. However, videos are some of the most complex-to- manage records an agency can have.
Since Granicus’ Public Records Complexity Index began tracking numbers of video files logged per quarter in Q1 2018, the number of video files handled by agencies has increased by 173%, including large jumps coinciding with periods of great civil unrest and calls for police transparency.
With the ever-broadening access to inexpensive video recording tools, the importance of video files in public records shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, it continues to increase in popularity and impact. Understanding the ways in which video files can create problems for agencies, and knowing how to better manage them, can make this otherwise daunting area easier to deal with.
File size is a major factor adding to complexity. While a 500-page document is around 20 MB, a video file using that same amount of data is only about 20 seconds long. With camera technology becoming more sophisticated all the time — wider panoramas, higher resolution, and capabilities like compression, streaming, storage, and analytics — file sizes will just keep increasing, straining abilities to manipulate, send, and store files.
Complicating this further, state and local laws governing the recording of video and the subsequent management of that data for ongoing public records create further challenges. With officer-involved shootings front and center in the public eye and multiple sources of video evidence, jurisdictions are spending enormous amounts of time struggling to provide relevant legislative frameworks and managing the release of footage accordingly. It’s not getting easier or clearer anytime soon.
Unlike other digital files, video files require special skills and crippling investments of time to redact video footage to meet burgeoning legal requirements, including privacy protection. These measures include blurring or blacking out heads, license plates, and home interiors.
A welcome development is the ability of AI-enabled software to automatically and efficiently identify and redact portions of images that must be obscured to protect privacy, providing a key solution to the complexity of video/audio record requests.
Granicus has partnered with Veritone to integrate video and audio redaction tools into public record request management workflows, making redaction up to 90% faster than other methods. However, whether using sophisticated AI tools or manual methods of redaction, the more video files an agency must process for public records requests, the more complexity increases.
“Today, (body-worn cameras) are likely the most rapidly diffusing technologies in modern police history… Body‐worn cameras’ effects on police officers and citizen behavior: A systematic review, September 2020″
As of the publish date for this blog, the most recent available national statistics on use of body-worn cameras (BWCs) in policing come from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2016 data. At that time, 60% of local police departments and 49% of sheriff’s offices had fully deployed BWCs — double the number in use in 2013.
From 2016 to 2020, Congress appropriated $112.5 million for a grant program to help law enforcement agencies overcome the biggest obstacle to onboarding BWC systems: the cost of hardware, video storage, and system maintenance.
One real-life story puts that amount into sobering perspective: Almost 0.5% of the entire federal grant was needed to fund a single city of 100,000. From the News-Gazette in central Illinois in 2025:
A number of jurisdictions, including Portland, Oregon, have cut police bodycam pilot programs due to cost and budget issues, and Oregon jurisdictions can charge requesters for redaction time, unlike many others.
The Washington Post reported in 2019 that “politicians and community activists seized on police body cameras as a way to restore public trust. But although the cameras were widely adopted, many departments — especially in smaller jurisdictions — are now dropping or delaying their programs, finding it too expensive to store and manage the thousands of hours of footage.” This includes East Dundee, Illinois, (pop. 3,000), which would have spent $20,000 per year on bodycams.
Not only are BWCs proliferating, law enforcement agencies are creating and gathering a multitude of other types of video and audio not only to aid in their work but in response to public demand for transparency and accountability in the face of high-profile incidents involving police use of force. These include dashcams, publicly and privately collected surveillance video, audio and video recordings of interviews, footage from drones and helicopters, imaging from automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), and a host of others.
In 2020, the American Bar Association reported that in 2018, California became only the third state in the nation [following South Carolina and Nevada] to require that all police departments in the state deploy BWCs.
Yet, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), as of April 2021, the seven states that they list as mandating the statewide use of body-worn cameras by law enforcement officers as Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Carolina.
While the ABA article included New York and Nevada, neither New York’s nor Nevada’s legislation appear to be blanket mandates for all law enforcement agencies in the state, instead leaving patchwork situations with the potential to create even more complexity.
The ABA’s characterization of California’s BWC mandate as applying to all jurisdictions also appeared to be mistaken as California does not mandate BWCs statewide.
So why so much confusion?
State (and local) laws relating to law enforcement video (especially bodycams) are becoming increasingly tangled webs governing a variety of factors, including:
The list only goes on from there. Further, according to the NCSL, fewer than half of U.S. states have legislated how body-worn camera data is addressed under open record laws.
The average officer’s BWC produces 32 files, seven hours, and 20 GB of video per month. In California, that translates to 550 law enforcement agencies averaging 100 officers each equipped with BWCs, amounting to more than 38,000 files, with a massive amount of video: almost 8,500 hours of footage at more than 23 TB of data per year.
While video and audio collected by law enforcement agencies is usually considered public record, it is subject to a host of exemptions including those relating to individuals’ privacy, confidentiality around certain law enforcement practices, integrity of ongoing investigations, and other factors.
Just as with paper or electronic documents, exempt data must be redacted from video and audio, and an exemption log created to document what was redacted. As video public records have started being collected and requested, this redaction has proven to be incredibly painstaking and time-consuming — on the order of five to 10 hours to redact one hour of video, even with traditional video editing or BWC-paired software offered by camera manufacturers to leverage efforts.
From the technology perspective, the problem of having to spend hours redacting video and audio comes down to the difference between structured and unstructured data.
In California’s 2020 Supreme Court case involving whether a city police department could charge a requester for time spent to redact video footage from officers’ response to a demonstration, the city initially identified 141 video files totaling 90 hours that were potentially responsive.
The city worked with the requester to narrow the scope, reducing the request to six hours of video. Even with the significant reduction and help of software, the redaction took 40 hours. The city billed the requester for around $3,000, which the Supreme Court ultimately concluded state law did not authorize. If the requester had not agreed to reduce the scope, the bill would have come to around $45,000, an unsustainable use of staff time and public funds.
Software can recognize, search for, and redact digitized documents very quickly, even if the words and letters don’t have identical appearances (different fonts, etc.). The reason? This data is structured, making it easily recognizable for “regular” software to readily read.
Video and photographic images, including specific elements within them such as faces, are much more complex. They require cooperation between our eyes and brains to recognize a multiplicity of forms and contexts: lighting, angle, color, partially obscured, in motion, etc. This kind of data is unstructured, not in an easily recognizable code. Recognizing whether something is a face, or a license plate instead of a street sign takes intelligence.
This blog post by the Seattle Police Department (SPD) shows how far things have come in just a few years. In 2015, the city sponsored a hackathon to develop processes to redact video from its pilot bodycam program:
It’s easy to see why SPD’s objective at the time to immediately release all bodycam video online to a Youtube channel didn’t pan out.
This is where artificial intelligence comes in. Computers and software have been able to recognize and manipulate structured data for quite a while, but as this source puts it:
“When you give [cameras and computers] a file, whether it’s an image or a video, understanding isn’t automatic. To machines, a picture or video of a license plate isn’t any different from one that shows a football player or a skyscraper or a sweet potato.”
AI builds “intelligence” into software so it can now do much more complex tasks like recognizing and redacting faces in widely varying contexts.
Granicus has created an available integration with Veritone digital evidence management software to create an end-to-end solution for responding to requests for video and audio that greatly reduces redaction time from five to 10 hours for one hour of video down to one hour of redaction time.
The realm of law enforcement video is transforming rapidly on all fronts, making it increasingly difficult for jurisdictions to decide if and how they will implement camera programs. With officer-involved shootings and reports of alleged misconduct coming thick and fast, there is greater demand for accountability and transparency.
Technology is transforming with lightning speed, and law enforcement agencies are under pressure from all sides. Lawmakers struggle to keep up with appropriately regulating potentially explosive new information sources and sophisticated tools. And finally, the true costs of video programs — not in initial acquisition but long-term costs to store, manipulate, and provide footage to the public — is becoming starkly clearer.
The solution to the challenge of reviewing and redacting increasing stores of video and audio files will be seen in the Public Records Complexity Index data over time, as more agencies adopt AI redaction tools and allow them to start getting costs under control as a result. We expect that video file counts will continue to increase; but time to process will start to move inversely.
Managing Requests for Public Records is Getting Harder. Now There’s PROOF.
Learn more about the index in the 2025 Public Record Complexity Benchmark Report.
