Michael Rich discusses police body cameras with Pacific Standard

Elon Law's Maurice Jennings Emerging Scholar offered a legal analysis of an ongoing public policy debate for an award-winning magazine dedicated to "forward-looking changes to private behavior and public policy."

Associate Professor Michael Rich
Associate Professor Michael Rich, Elon Law’s Maurice Jennings Emerging Scholar, spoke recently with Pacific Standard for a feature on the public policy debate over the legal treatment of police camera footage – and whether such footage should be considered a public record. 

Rich also was quoted recently in a feature story on police camera footage by The Atlantic’s CityLab for a guest column he had distributed via the Elon University Writers Syndicate.

From Pacific Standard’s “Should Police Body Camera Footage Be Public Record?”

“Without a doubt there are privacy issues, but the public records laws in North Carolina, and in most other states, take into account issues of personal privacy and limit the release of public records that would unduly intrude on individual privacy. Body-worn camera footage is really good evidence of what happened during interactions between police and civilians, and it almost seems like, for some reason, police departments as well as members of the North Carolina legislature don’t want people to see it.”

Rich’s areas of research and teaching include the philosophical boundaries of criminal law, civil and criminal white-collar litigation, police investigatory methods, and government fraud. 

Before joining academia, Rich practiced at the Cincinnati law firm of Vorys Sater Seymour & Pease LLP, where he worked mainly on government fraud litigation under the civil False Claims Act, civil rights litigation, and white-collar criminal cases. He began his legal career at the New York City law firm of Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP, where his practice focused on the litigation of claims under the First Amendment seeking access to public property and public accommodations.