How a Seattle Programmer Used Public Records Laws to Push Police to Fix a Surveillance Video Tech Headache

In October, an anonymous Seattle-area man made an unusual public records request of Emerald City police: release more than 1.5 million Seattle Police Department surveillance videos to the public in 48 hours. His legal request—police videos are covered under the state’s Public Records Act—sent local law enforcement into a panic, faced with an overwhelming, impossible to satisfy burden.

He could have easily become SPD’s biggest nuisance. Instead, by December he was brainstorming with officials and offering consultation on how to streamline and improve local law enforcement’s efforts at transparency.

However, his rapid transition from instigator to collaborator came with a cost: local media were seeking to reveal his identity through their own public information requests and he worried about becoming a target of individuals in and out of law enforcement who oppose to his effort to open up government data.

The formerly anonymous Timothy A. Clemans, 24, spoke with GovExec State & Local in an expansive interview where the systems analyst detailed his specific plans to help SPD improve its transparency efforts and how a charge of reckless driving inspired his crusade to make law enforcement more open and responsive for officials and the people they serve.

“Ninety percent of [law enforcement] videos can be released without any type of formal review,” Clemans said in a phone interview this week. “Out of 1.6 million videos, maybe only 80,000 need some form of redaction and it’s unlikely that a majority of them are even interesting.”

Censoring private and privileged information is a major obstacle standing in the way of law enforcement agencies releasing surveillance video and other similar data in an expedited manner. “In keeping with Washington state privacy laws, SPD video specialists must often manually redact or remove faces and voices from those recordings to protect the identities of victims, witnesses, and juveniles,” according to a SPD statement released in December. “A simple redaction in a one minute video can take specialists upward of half an hour, whereas more complicated edits—like blurring multiple faces or pieces of audio—can take much, much longer.”

But Clemans said he has written a set of code that rapidly identifies red-flag items and highlights them for redaction. By using his software, he said the SPD can bypass the countless hours required to have employees or even volunteers sift through all the raw data.

“It’s a fully autonomous solution,” he said. “We can use a software program to transcribe and remove audio. It would really deal with the privacy issues. I wrote a simple script that looks for and is able to properly remove the personal information exactly how they do it by hand. It’s very precise.”

After Clemans, who is also behind the @PoliceVideos Twitter feed, made his initial massive request for access to police surveillance video, SPD Chief Information Officer Mike Wagers agreed to meet with him directly. Clemans agreed to drop the request in exchange for a promise from police officials to open up their efforts at transparency. A direct result of that meeting was the department’s first ever “hackathon” last month, where the department invited civilian computer programmers to sift through hours of surveillance video that could then be made publicly available.

SPD's willingness to engage the community in its campaign to increase public transparency stands out during a time when strained police-community relations have made national headlines in places like New York City, Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere.

For example, a state prosecutor in New York City refused to honor an earlier promise to release evidence in connection to the choking death of Eric Garner.

Seattle is also launching its own body camera pilot program and may seek federal assistance and funding for the effort.

“They were just very friendly,” Clemans said of his experience meeting with SPD after his massive data dump request, which included 30 different public information requests. “I really did put them through hell.”

However, Clemans revealed that it was a negative interaction with the SPD and its use of technology that first set him off on his one-man mission to have more data made public. Last year, Clemans was pulled over while driving along a local street and was initially issued a DUI.

He said that after a test showed there was no alcohol in his system at the time, police changed the charge against him to reckless driving. He had his lawyer request access to video of the incident captured by a SPD vehicle in order to show that the charge wasn’t justified.

“An entire day’s worth of patrol car video is saved to a hard drive, typically about 32 gigabytes,” he said. “It’s available for emergency recovery in cases of shootings or other incidents when there isn’t surveillance video.”

When police declined to use the video in their case, Clemans’ lawyer was able to have his charge reduced to a civil infraction, arguing that there were inconsistencies between the police report and their patrol car video.

Still upset over the experience, he made a blanket public records request to have all patrol car video released to the public within 48 hours. However, he quickly realized that even if the SPD wanted to comply, it simply didn’t have the resources to do so.

WATCH: Anonymous Computer Programmer’s Interview with KING 5 News, Dec. 3, 2014

“I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time. It wasn’t until I got internal emails, that I realized what a shit storm I had created,” Clemans said, laughing. “There is not an easy solution for how you preserve, let alone go through hours and hours of surveillance video. But the law says it does need to be given out.”

“9 terabytes of data being generated every day by 300 patrol cars and they just didn’t have anyway to save it,” he continued. “I eventually gave up on my request with the idea that I would work closely with them.”

Just a few months later, the SPD is now engaged in a number of innovative attempts to increase access to public information, including a pilot program for police body cameras.

In a fascinating development, Clemans said he is part of a pilot program in which the King County Sheriff's Office aims to include him on nearly every internal email—you can read those emails here.

“They would change their email policy so that auto copy is required, teaching their employees just a very short list of exceptions like [the] SWAT team, client privileges and so on,” he said. “Otherwise, those emails just go straight to the Internet without the department having to process individual public records requests.”

Although his days of anonymity are over, Clemans said he plans to expand his efforts for greater government data transparency. He has a meeting scheduled with the City of Seattle later this month to discuss its newly created public records task force. He says the King County Sheriff’s Office is sending the person in charge of their pilot email program to accompany him and share the agency’s initial results with the city.

That meeting with Seattle officials came about only after a bit of pestering from Clemans that came in the form of him writing a bit of code that sent automated public records information requests to the city government every day.

Still, his methods seem to be having a bit of a ripple effect. The Yakima County Sheriff's Office reached out to Clemans as well to seek his help in its own transparency video automation efforts. Clemans said he's proud of the impact, even if he never expected it to go this far.

“I hate making records requests,” he said. “But you’re literally telling me my only solution is me taking you to court because an agency does not have someone in an appeals petition capacity. We need to get away from the requestor model. Agencies just need to put out information in an automated fashion. Investigators should have 48 hours and then it goes public.”