Khalil Ferebee, the son of Andrew Brown, Jr., looks on at Andrew's grandson Karter Ferebee after his grandfather was killed on May 02, 2021 in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. (Photo by Peter Zay/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
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At the time, North Carolina didn’t have any specific law governing whether police departments had to release bodycam footage or not and was silent on whether bodycam footage counted as a public record or a considered personnel records, which would be privileged and not allowed to be publicly accessed. That basically left each department to decide whether or not to release the materials.Republicans also had unified control of North Carolina’s government and crafted a solution they thought would balance the public’s right to know concerns about both police and victims’ privacy as well as protecting evidence in possible pending cases.“The key I think in the whole legislation is to find the person who’s neutral, not part of any side of the event, is just a decisionmaker for the process, and that’s what the judges were put in there for,” North Carolina GOP state Rep. John Faircloth, a retired policeman who was the law’s chief sponsor in the assembly, told VICE News.“This is the weirdest situation I’ve ever been in. I don’t know why the law was written this poorly.”
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