Photo by Matt Cohen.

Police Chief Cathy Lanier announced a pilot program last year to record the movements of 165 police officers through the use of body cameras, and Mayor Muriel Bowser has promised to expand the program. But who actually gets to see that footage has become a major point of contention.

“I’m here to say that the pilot is over and we will expand the use of body cameras to all MPD patrol officers in the next 18 months,” Boswer said during her State of the District address. “It’s the right thing to do for our officers and our residents. Accountability is embedded in everything this administration does.”

The mayor’s proposed 2016 budget, in fact, asks for more than $5 million over the next year and a half to purchase 2,800 body cameras. But it also would make the recordings exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests.

The American Civil Liberties Union slammed that move yesterday, writing in a press release that “a blanket FOIA exemption is one more tool to surveil the residents of the District of Columbia.”

The ACLU generally supports the use of body cameras. “With good policies in place, recording of police-civilian encounters will promote police accountability, deter officer and civilian misconduct, and provide objective evidence to help resolve civilian complaints against police without significantly infringing on privacy,” said Monica Hopkins-Maxwell, who heads the ACLU’s D.C. office. But the organization argues that exempting the footage from open records requests will negate the cameras’ effectiveness.

“Police accountability is not achieved by allowing the police to police themselves,” Hopkins-Maxwell said. The ACLU called on the D.C. Council not to approve funding for an expansion of the program without a “carefully crafted FOIA statute.”

Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, will hold a roundtable on the body camera program on May 7th. In an announcement of the hearing, he notes: “To date, all FOIA requests for the footage produced from the pilot program have been denied by MPD.”