South Bend Mayor Mueller chimes in on proposed fee increase for police recordings
SOUTH BEND, Ind. — At Mon. evening’s South Bend Common Council meeting, the board took a unanimous vote to table bill 43-25 until the August 11th meeting of the whole.
The proposed bill would raise the fee for requesting hard copies of law enforcement recordings through the Access to Public Records Act (APRA) from only the cost of the physical disk or CD to a fee schedule of $50 per hour it takes to edit, review or redact the video, up to $150 per recording.
During the meeting, the city attorney for South Bend, Jenna Throw, said since the city started using body cameras in 2018, they’ve received a total of 611 individual requests for body camera footage.
“When I ran the average since 2020, the average was 103, however if I look at the average just in the last three years, extrapolating the 2025 data as of July through the end of the year at a similar pace, the average jumps to 151, so the number of requests have gone up quite a bit in the last two years,” said Throw.
Common council member Dr. Oliver Davis responded to those numbers by pointing to 2019, when body cameras were still very new to the city.
On June 16 of that year, South Bend Police Sergeant Ryan O’Neill shot and killed a car break-in suspect, Eric Logan.
O’Neill was wearing a body camera, but it was not turned on at the time of the shooting. Dr. Davis said the incident garnered national attention to the city, which he said may be a reason behind the increase in requests.
“If this city remembers, in 2019 we had the Eric Logan situation… It is totally likely that more people around the country started zooming into South Bend to check about the body cameras that were a big topic at the time,” said Dr. Davis.
On Tues. during the quarterly Meet the Mayor and Team South Bend event, South Bend Mayor James Mueller said it’s the increase in requests from non-residents, like attorneys and business, through the Access to Public Records Act (APRA) the city is concerned about.
“Our city staff time is paid by the taxpayer and doesn’t make sense for taxpayers to be subsidizing folks from outside the city who are requesting more and more of these videos. That’s a fundamental issue,” said Muller.
The corporation counsel for South Bend, Sandra Kennedy said during the Mon. meeting that their team has been working on the bill for two years, researching the 16 other cities and 5 counties in Indiana that have some sort of fee schedule.
“The reason we haven’t come is we’ve been working on it, A, and B… we’re just trying to keep doing our jobs… we’re struggling underwater asking for help at this time and all I’m hearing is it’s going to hurt people…it’s not meant to hurt people and so I’m sorry if that’s what’s coming across to everyone in this room,” said Kennedy.
City legal said their hope is that charging for the time it takes to review and redact police video, up to 150 dollars per recording, would guide people to be more specific on what they need a copy of, which would lighten the legal team’s load with the increase of requests coming in.
Dr. Davis said he would rather see this money come from the police or legal team’s budget, but Mayor Mueller doesn’t agree.
“The state just passed a law that’s going to drastically reduce revenue both property tax and income tax, it’s actually the changes to income tax coming in three years that has us most worried, we’ll be talking about the budget here in a few short weeks, but once we get into those discussions, I think people will see the real impact that the Senate Bill one that passed the state house this session will have on local governments like South Bend,” said Mueller.