Most people assume body-worn camera footage is a public record. In Minnesota it is not. The Legislature wrote the opposite default into the statute and then carved out exceptions, and the exceptions are where every practical question lives.
Minn. Stat. § 13.825, subd. 2(a) begins: “Data collected by a portable recording system are private data on individuals or nonpublic data, subject to the following.” Everything else is an exception to that sentence. If none of the exceptions applies, the recording is not public, and a general public-records request will be lawfully denied.
That matters because there is a clock running underneath all of it. Under subd. 3(a), footage that is not criminal investigative data and not otherwise covered “must be maintained for at least 90 days and destroyed according to the agency’s records retention schedule approved pursuant to section 138.17.” Ninety days is the floor. In a great many incidents it is also the ceiling.
The five exceptions in subdivision 2(a)
Subdivision 2(a) contains five numbered clauses. They are worth reading in order, because they operate differently.
Clause (1) — serious force is public. Data that “record, describe, or otherwise document actions and circumstances surrounding either the discharge of a firearm by a peace officer in the course of duty, if a notice is required under section 626.553, subdivision 2, or the use of force by a peace officer that results in substantial bodily harm, as defined in section 609.02, subdivision 7a, are public.”
Two definitions do the work. Section 626.553, subd. 2 requires notification to the commissioner of public safety within 30 days whenever “a peace officer discharges a firearm in the course of duty, other than for training purposes or the killing of an animal that is sick, injured, or dangerous.” And “substantial bodily harm” under § 609.02, subd. 7a means “bodily injury which involves a temporary but substantial disfigurement, or which causes a temporary but substantial loss or impairment of the function of any bodily member or organ, or which causes a fracture of any bodily member.” A bruise is not substantial bodily harm. A broken bone is.
Clause (2) — a subject can make it public. Data “are public if a subject of the data requests it be made accessible to the public,” except that, “if practicable,” data on a non-officer subject who does not consent to release must be redacted, and data on an officer whose identity is protected under § 13.82, subd. 17, clause (a) — undercover officers — must be redacted. A person who appears in the recording can convert it to public data.
Clause (3) — the active-investigation trapdoor. Portable recording system data that are active criminal investigative data are governed by § 13.82, subd. 7; inactive criminal investigative data are governed by § 13.825. This clause swallows most requests in the first months after an incident.
Clause (4) — discipline data. Data that are public personnel data under § 13.43, subd. 2(a), clause (5), are public. That clause makes public “the final disposition of any disciplinary action together with the specific reasons for the action and data documenting the basis of the action, excluding data that would identify confidential sources who are employees of the public body.” Footage documenting the basis for a completed disciplinary action is therefore public — after the discipline is final, not before, and subject to that confidential-source exclusion.
Clause (5) — everything else keeps its classification. “Data that are not public data under other provisions of this chapter retain that classification.”
Two limits sit alongside these. Under subd. 2(e), an agency “may redact or withhold access to portions of data that are public under this subdivision if those portions of data are clearly offensive to common sensibilities” — a determination that can itself be challenged in district court under subd. 2(g). And under subd. 2(f), the Tennessen warning requirement of § 13.04, subd. 2 does not apply to collection of this data.
The active-investigation problem
Section 13.82, subd. 7 is the single largest obstacle to getting footage early. Investigative data “collected or created by a law enforcement agency in order to prepare a case against a person, whether known or unknown, for the commission of a crime or other offense for which the agency has primary investigative responsibility are confidential or protected nonpublic while the investigation is active.”
The statute then defines when an investigation stops being active: on “a decision by the agency or appropriate prosecutorial authority not to pursue the case”; on “expiration of the time to bring a charge or file a complaint under the applicable statute of limitations, or 30 years after the commission of the offense, whichever comes earliest”; or on “exhaustion of or expiration of all rights of appeal by a person convicted on the basis of the investigative data.”
Two sentences in the same subdivision cut the other way and are easy to miss. First: “Any investigative data presented as evidence in court shall be public.” Second, while an investigation is active, “any person may bring an action in the district court located in the county where the data are being maintained to authorize disclosure of investigative data,” and the court weighs “whether the benefit to the person bringing the action or to the public outweighs any harm to the public, to the agency or to any person identified in the data,” examining the data in camera.
The data-subject route
For someone who was actually in the encounter, subd. 4 is usually the fastest path, and it is broader than people expect.
Subdivision 4(a) defines the subject expansively: a data subject “includes the peace officer who collected the data, and any other individual or entity, including any other peace officer, regardless of whether the officer is or can be identified by the recording, whose image or voice is documented in the data.” Voice alone is enough.
Subdivision 4(b) then grants access: “An individual who is the subject of portable recording system data has access to the data, including data on other individuals who are the subject of the recording. If the individual requests a copy of the recording, data on other individuals who do not consent to its release must be redacted from the copy. The identity and activities of an on-duty peace officer engaged in an investigation or response to an emergency, incident, or request for service may not be redacted, unless the officer’s identity is subject to protection under section 13.82, subdivision 17, clause (a).”
Note what that last sentence does. An agency may not black out the officer. It may black out other civilians who do not consent, but the officer’s identity and activities stay in the copy.
There is also a traffic-collision route. Under subd. 4(c), and “[n]otwithstanding section 13.82, subdivision 7,” a person entitled to a collision report under § 169.09, subd. 13 must, on written request accompanied by the accident report, “be provided with copies of unredacted data from all portable recording systems used in the collision investigation.” The data may be used only to process a claim related to the collision or as evidence in a related proceeding, and misuse exposes the requester to the remedies and penalties of § 13.08. That paragraph “does not apply to the Minnesota State Patrol.”
Where footage is denied outright, subd. 2(g) allows any person to bring a district court action to authorize disclosure of private or nonpublic recording data, with the disputed data examined in camera.
Death in custody: five days and fourteen days
Where “an individual dies as a result of a use of force by a peace officer,” subd. 2(b) requires the involved officer’s agency, “[n]otwithstanding section 13.82, subdivision 7,” to allow the deceased person’s next of kin, the legal representative of the next of kin, and the other parent of the deceased’s child, on request, “to inspect all portable recording system data, redacted no more than what is required by law, documenting the incident within five days of the request.”
The agency may deny inspection under subd. 2(c) only if “there is a compelling reason that inspection would interfere with an active investigation,” and the chief law enforcement officer must then provide a prompt written denial describing that reason and stating that relief may be sought from the district court under § 13.82, subd. 7.
Subdivision 2(d) goes further: in the same circumstances the agency “shall release all portable recording system data, redacted no more than what is required by law, documenting the incident no later than 14 days after the incident, unless the chief law enforcement officer asserts in writing that the public classification would interfere with an ongoing investigation.” Who holds the underlying claim in that situation is a separate question, addressed in who can sue when someone dies in custody.
Retention: the number that decides cases
Subdivision 3 sets several retention rules, and the gap between them is enormous. The baseline is 90 days. One year applies if the data document a firearm discharge requiring § 626.553, subd. 2 notice, or “the use of force by a peace officer that results in substantial bodily harm,” or if “a formal complaint is made against a peace officer related to the incident.” Data documenting “a peace officer’s use of deadly force must be maintained indefinitely.” And under subd. 3(e), an agency “may retain a recording for as long as reasonably necessary for possible evidentiary or exculpatory use related to the incident.”
Two of those are levers rather than facts. Filing a formal complaint against the officer converts a 90-day retention floor into a one-year floor. And subd. 3(d) gives any subject of the data a written request that “the law enforcement agency shall retain the recording for an additional time period requested by the subject of up to 180 days,” after which the agency must notify the requester that the recording will be destroyed unless a new request is made. A written retention request costs nothing and can be renewed. It is the first thing to send.
What is public even when the video is not
Chapter 13 makes a good deal public independent of the footage. Under § 13.82, subd. 2, arrest data are “public at all times in the originating agency,” including “any resistance encountered by the agency”; “any pursuit engaged in by the agency”; “whether any weapons were used by the agency or other individual”; the identities of the agencies, units, and individual persons taking the action; and “whether the agency employed a portable recording system, automated license plate reader, wiretaps or other eavesdropping techniques, unless the release of this specific data would jeopardize an ongoing investigation.”
Response or incident data under § 13.82, subd. 6 are likewise public, including “a brief factual reconstruction of events associated with the action,” names and addresses of witnesses and of victims or casualties unless protected under subd. 17, and “whether the agency used a portable recording system to document the agency’s response or actions.” Booking photographs are public data under § 13.82, subd. 26(b), though an agency may temporarily withhold one if access “will adversely affect an active investigation.”
The agency’s own body-camera program is public too. Section 13.825, subd. 5 makes public the number of recording devices the agency owns, a daily record of how many were actually deployed, the written policy required by § 626.8473, and the retention schedule and destruction procedures. Section 626.8473, subd. 3(a) requires that policy to be posted on the agency’s website if it has one, and subd. 3(b)(1) requires the policy to “prohibit altering, erasing, or destroying any recording made with a peace officer’s portable recording system or data and metadata related to the recording prior to the expiration of the applicable retention period.”
Enforcement
Chapter 13’s general remedies in § 13.08 — damages, costs, attorney fees, injunction, and exemplary damages “of not less than $1,000, nor more than $15,000 for each violation” for a willful violation — apply here, and are covered in using chapter 13 to build a case.
Section 13.825 adds two remedies of its own. Under subd. 12, “in the case of a willful violation of this section a law enforcement agency is subject to exemplary damages of not less than twice the minimum, nor more than twice the maximum allowable for exemplary damages under section 13.08, subdivision 1” — doubling the § 13.08 range, which as arithmetic means $2,000 to $30,000. And under subd. 11, a private vendor that stores or processes this data is treated as a government entity subject to chapter 13, is liable for “presumed damages of $2,500 or actual damages, whichever is greater, and reasonable attorney fees,” and is liable for presumed damages of $10,000 if it improperly discloses data made not public.
The practical sequence
Body-camera data is not a record you request once. It is a record you preserve, then classify, then pry loose in stages. Send a written retention request under subd. 3(d) immediately, and file a formal complaint if one is warranted. Request the agency’s § 626.8473 policy and its subd. 5 inventory data, and the arrest and incident data under § 13.82, subds. 2 and 6 — all public regardless. If you were in the recording, make a data-subject request under subd. 4 rather than a general public-data request. And track the investigation’s status, because the day it becomes inactive under § 13.82, subd. 7 is the day the classification changes.
Two related pieces sit alongside this one: Minnesota’s three privacy regimes explains how chapter 13 fits with the state’s private-sector privacy statutes, and Minnesota’s recording-consent rules covers recordings made by private citizens rather than by agencies. The substantive standard governing what the video may show an officer doing is a different statute — Minn. Stat. § 609.066.
Madgett Law, LLC litigates civil rights and police misconduct claims in Minnesota state and federal court, and handles Data Practices Act questions arising from government records. If you need to preserve a recording before a retention period runs, that is time-sensitive. Send us a message or call 612-470-6529.
Sources: Minn. Stat. § 13.825 (subd. 1(b), definitions; subd. 2(a) classification and clauses (1)–(5); subd. 2(b)–(d), death resulting from use of force, five-day inspection and fourteen-day release; subd. 2(e), clearly offensive to common sensibilities; subd. 2(f), Tennessen warning inapplicable; subd. 2(g), district court action; subd. 3(a)–(e), retention; subd. 4(a)–(c), access by data subjects and collision-report access; subd. 5, public inventory data; subd. 11(a), (c)–(d), vendor obligations and damages; subd. 12, doubled exemplary damages); Minn. Stat. § 13.82 (subd. 2, arrest data, including clause (k); subd. 6, response or incident data, including clauses (f) and (n); subd. 7, criminal investigative data, definition of inactive, evidence presented in court, and district court action; subd. 17, clause (a), protected identities; subd. 26(b), booking photographs); Minn. Stat. § 13.08, subd. 1 (exemplary damages range); Minn. Stat. § 13.43, subd. 2(a), clause (5) (public disciplinary disposition data); Minn. Stat. § 626.8473 (subd. 3(a), written policy and website posting; subd. 3(b)(1), prohibition on premature destruction); Minn. Stat. § 626.553, subd. 2 (firearm discharge notification); Minn. Stat. § 609.02, subd. 7a (substantial bodily harm) — all from the Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes.
This article is general legal information about Minnesota law, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney–client relationship. Classification and retention outcomes depend on the specific incident, the agency, and the status of any investigation. No outcome is promised or implied.