The Milwaukee Post

November 17, 2017 • Milwaukee County Post • 9 OPINION By OWEN B. ROBINSON Technology has always pushed the bound- aries of culture and it often takes time for the law to catch up. As body cameras become more common for police, the management of that footage has largely been left to individ- ual law enforcement agencies. The Wisconsin state Assembly has passed a good bill to govern the public's access to law enforcement body cam footage that the state Senate and governor should quickly enact into law. The use of body cams by law enforcement has been expanding mainly due to the pub- lic's pressure to do so. Americans grant a lot of power to our police and extend a lot of trust that they will use that power appropri- ately on our behalf. But that trust is not absolute and in the wake of a series of high- profile incidents where a law enforcement officer killed a citizen under questionable circumstances, many members of the gen- eral public pushed for police to wear body cams to help discern the truth in such inci- dents. On the other side of the coin, many law enforcement officers asked to use body cams under the belief that while a body cam video might indict a cop doing something illegally, it might also exonerate a cop who is wrong- ly being accused of com- mitting a crime. Now that many law enforce- ment agencies are using body cams, the results are predictably varied. What we are finding is that the body cam footage of controversial incidents rarely conclu- sively show the "truth," and a jolting video rarely quells the contro- versy. While the use of body cam footage may not be the antidote to controversy that many had hoped, body cams have become a useful tool in the routine business of law enforce- ment. The question remains: Now that we have thousands of law enforcement officers going about their work while recording themselves and all of the people around them, who is allowed to see those record- ings? In general, the video recorded by law enforcement's body cams are public records. That means that upon request, the law enforcement agency must give that video to anyone who asks unless there is a com- pelling government interest not to do so. Our common law has always set a fairly high bar for withholding public documents, so the end result is that 95 percent of requests for police body cam video are granted. This presents a problem in balancing the public's right to know with the individual's right to privacy and protection under the Fourth Amendment. While policies for when law enforcement officers activate their body cams vary, most of them are recording whenever they are engaging a member of the public for any reason. This means that even when an officer is engaging a citizen who has not committed a crime, which is the vast majority of the time, that engagement may be recorded and released on the internet for everyone to see. For example, if an officer responds to an elderly person's fall in his or her home, that could be recorded and released. If an officer responds to a woman who was raped, that encounter could be recorded and released. If an officer helps a person who slid into a ditch, that could be recorded and released. While some of these incidents are benign, releasing the video of the encounter could be embarrassing for the citizen, or worse, used by someone to harass or further trau- matize a victim of a crime. Rep. Jesse Kremer's, R-Kewaskum, bill seeks to set some reasonable standards for when law enforcement body cams must be released and when they should be kept con- fidential. Under the bill, footage would be considered an open record and available to the public if it was taken in a public place and involved a death, assault, arrest or search. If one of those actions occurred in a place where a person had a reasonable expectation of privacy, then the footage could only be released if all of the people involved agree. Under Kremer's bill, police body cam footage would still be available for any legal action, civil or criminal, but only footage of actual or suspected criminal behavior could be released to the public. This strikes a rea- sonable balance that allows the public to continue to have general oversight of police in the most serious encounters, but protects the public from malcontents using police videos for harassment, bullying, preying, or just feeding their creepy voyeurism. This bill was passed on a bipartisan voice vote in the Assembly and now sits in the Senate awaiting action. The Senate should pick up Kremer's torch and carry it to Governor Walker's desk. (Owen B. Robinson is a West Bend resident whose column appears occasionally in The Milwaukee County Post. He can be reached at owen@bootsandsabers.com.) By THEODORE LIPSCOMB SR. In a democracy, the people rule. In our representative democracy, elected officials are expected to listen to their constituents and enact the will of the people. Checks and balances are built into the American system of government to require compro- mise. As a result, no elected official gets everything they want. In the modern era of American politics, the referendum is a common way to meas- ure public sentiment. In the spring of 2017, Milwaukee County voters rejected County Executive Chris Abele's $60 wheel tax by a landslide: 72 percent opposed it. For five years after becoming county executive in 2011, Chris Abele was known for his austerity budgets and policies, such as his rejection of a living wage, and his near obsession with paying down the debt rather than investing in transit or parks. He boasted about never increasing taxes. After he was re-elected in 2016, Abele did an about-face, for the first time proposing a property tax increase and a $60 wheel tax — the largest proposed Milwaukee County tax increase in decades. The Milwaukee County Board listened to citizens and cut Abele's wheel tax in half, to $30, and called upon the Legislature to allow us to apply the wheel tax progressively. Supervisors then put the $60 question to voters, who said "No." Abele refused to listen, saying before and after the referendum that he would pro- pose a $60 wheel tax again in his 2018 budget. Abele's 2018 budget proposal was built around the $60 wheel tax that voters rejected, leaving supervisors with the tough choices of how to find about $16 mil- lion in savings to avoid his massive fee increase. Our budget avoids doubling the wheel tax by using a balanced approach: a smaller property tax increase, a rejection of about half of Abele's request for new, unfunded positions, delaying road proj- ects that Abele's own appointees to the Capital Improvement Committee did not recommend, holding off on a new voice- mail system and point-of-sale system, spending less of our savings, buying fewer new buses, and asking all departments to absorb a three-quarter of 1 percent reduc- tion in expenditures, among other meas- ures. County Executive Abele is spending at least $250,000 to run attack ads accusing me and the County Board of "demanding deep service cuts" of $15 million, even specifying absurd cuts I would never sup- port, like ending the UpLift MKE program (based on the Ready to Work initiative, which I co-authored) and closing the Schulz Aquatic Center (which is in my dis- trict), among other bizarre claims. An effective propaganda technique is to tell a lie so big that people believe it. It's a clever trick that uses kernel of truth to spin a preposterous tale that plays on stereotypes, and then amplifies the lie through repetition. Abele's phony claim of "$15 million in deep service cuts" is based on a modest reduction in departmental budgets of 0.75 percent, for a savings of $3.75 million. My proposal prioritizes services by giving control back to department heads, who can manage their departmental budgets to find these savings. Indeed, I know it can be done because all the independently elected county officials have already come for- ward with specific plans to find these sav- ings in their departments. In a democracy, the people decide. The people rejected Abele's wheel tax increase. Supervisors will continue to listen to the people, and compromise is required of all parties in order to continue providing quality public services, which is why we've agreed to more than 98 percent of what Abele asked for in his budget. This is democracy. The result is a better, more bal- anced and more responsible budget. (Theodore Lipscomb Sr. is the Milwaukee County Board chairman.) The people trump county exec's 'deep service cuts' lie, $60 wheel tax State should standardize access to police body cam videos Robinson Department heads best able to handle modest budget cut Lipscomb

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