Are Colorado law enforcement agencies allowed to charge the public thousands of dollars for body-worn camera footage of incidents of alleged officer misconduct?

Court briefs recently submitted in a Boulder County District Court case lay out arguments on both sides of this legal question for a judge to consider at a hearing in July.

In April, Yellow Scene Magazine sued the Boulder Police Department over its insistence that the news organization pay the city $2,857.50 to obtain video of the 2023 fatal shooting of 51-year-old Jeanette Alatorre by officers near the North Boulder Recreation Center. Alatorre’s daughter, Jeannette Orozco, joined the lawsuit after she too requested the recordings.

The plaintiffs point out that Colorado’s Law Enforcement Integrity Act, enacted in 2020 following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, contains no language authorizing Boulder to charge fees for unedited body-cam footage of incidents “in which there is a complaint of peace officer misconduct.” But Boulder argues that the requested video is “indisputably” a criminal justice record under the Colorado Criminal Justice Records Act, which permits the assessment of “reasonable fees, not to exceed actual costs” for the search, retrieval and redaction of records.