Phoenix Raises Police Records Fees, Aiming at the Viral Bodycam Video Industry

PHOENIX — If you make money off Phoenix police records, you're about to start paying more for them. The City Council approved a new public-records fee schedule on Sept. 23 that takes effect Nov. 1, and city officials were blunt about who it's aimed at: the commercial outfits that request officers' body-camera footage, edit it into viral entertainment videos, and rack up millions of views.

The pitch from City Manager Ed Zuercher to the council was as direct as it gets. The new structure was built to land heaviest on requests made for commercial purposes, he said — and then came the line that sums up the whole policy:

"If you're making money off of our public records, you should pay more."— City Manager Ed Zuercher, via AZCentral

The numbers behind the move are stark. Commercial requests to the Phoenix Police Department have climbed nearly one-third over the past five years, according to Court Hood, the assistant director of the department's records unit. And those requests look nothing like the ones ordinary Phoenicians file. As Hood put it, the average person asks for their traffic crash report; commercial requestors ask for several reports or officer body-camera videos at a time. One commercial requestor asked for more than 100 videos in a single day.

Hood showed councilmembers exactly what the footage becomes. On a presentation slide: small advertisements for videos produced from public-records requests, headlined "Simple traffic stop turns into 7-hour standoff" and "Cops discover sick recordings while searching for missing baby." Those videos had pulled in millions of views in a matter of weeks, he said.

His message to the council was that the request process itself has become part of these companies' business model:

"These commercial requestors are using the public records request process as part of their business model, essentially, which ultimately impacts our ability and capacity to serve victims' families and other requestors who have true needs."— Court Hood, assistant director of police records, via AZCentral

The department even named a name. Commander Mercedes Fortune, a department spokesperson, said she recalled one company, EWU Media, that would routinely request hundreds of hours of video — and insisted every request go through the department's most time-intensive redaction process, telling the department it had no use for the quicker "medium blur" releases. EWU Media describes itself on its website, according to AZCentral's reporting, as a "cutting-edge media company and news-gathering agency"; one of its channels, EWU Bodycam, offers what the site calls "unfiltered bodycam footage" and "an unprecedented look at incidents as they unfold." The company did not return AZCentral's request for comment.

What makes the video requests so expensive to fulfill is the second redaction pass. The department first offers requestors an initial release of body-camera footage that is largely blurred out; a requestor can then ask for a specific segment with a clearer picture but pinpoint redactions to protect victims and law-enforcement techniques. That secondary, surgical redaction is the part that eats hours. Under the new fee schedule, the initial "medium blur" release stays free — but a video with normal redactions will cost $23 for each 30-minute segment, which the department says is in line with the maximum allowable fee under Arizona state law.

Reports get the same commercial/noncommercial split. Noncommercial users will be able to get digital copies of reports for free; printing costs 25 cents a page. Commercial users pay a $10 fee per report, plus 25 cents per page. The department's public-records portal now asks every requestor to declare whether the request is for a commercial purpose — defined, according to the form, as any request where one could "reasonably anticipate the receipt of monetary gain from the direct use of the public record."

The revenue is earmarked for the backlog itself. The increased fees are expected to fund 10 additional full-time employees and 19 temporary hires, plus six people reassigned from other departments — 35 people focused largely on clearing the video-request backlog, with a target of having the department's entire backlog fulfilled by the end of December 2027. After that, Hood said, most requests should turn around in a matter of days.

Phoenix is not inventing this fight. The "bodycam hustle," as New York magazine dubbed it, is a national phenomenon: the ABA Journal reported in February that more than 150 YouTube channels routinely post arrest footage obtained through public-records requests, and the city clerk of Las Cruces, New Mexico, told the magazine her office's records requests had jumped 140% between 2024 and 2025 — adding that her city had landed on requestors' lists of municipalities that are "easy to get records from." The biggest channel of them all, PoliceActivity, has nearly seven million subscribers, according to Current Affairs. The raw material for all of it is the same footage Phoenix officers record every shift.

The department declined to make Hood available for an interview with The Arizona Republic, and EWU Media didn't respond to a comment request — so the record here is the council's, and the council has made its call: transparency stays open, but the commercial customers start paying the true cost of the labor they consume. Our Phoenix sports coverage and affordable-housing reporting have more from the Valley.

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