The family of a young man killed by police at a soccer park south of Birmingham says an officer shot him in the back.

But police won’t show the video to the public or even to Jabari Peoples’ family.

Across the state — in Decatur, Bay Minette, Huntsville, Madison, and Montgomery — the pattern repeats: Someone dies in police custody, grieving families ask for body camera footage, and authorities often say no with the same refrain: “Due to an ongoing investigation.”

“In order to eliminate some of the confusion, disruption, lawsuits even, and the mistrust and distrust of law enforcement, I think the video camera footage should be shown,” said Robert Clopton, president of the Mobile branch of the NAACP. “If there is nothing to hide, why hide it?”

In Alabama, police now know they don’t have to release the tapes.

Four years ago, the state supreme court ruled that police can keep all of their investigative materials, including bodycams, hidden from the public.

And a state law passed in 2023, allows them to choose whether to keep the footage hidden from families.

While there’s no law or court ruling that says they can’t show the footage, in Alabama, that only tends to happen when the videos are convenient for police, or if a judge orders it released years after the fact.

“There is no mechanism to force law enforcement to produce the footage to family or anyone else,” said J. Evans Bailey, attorney for the Alabama Press Association. “This can and probably has led to situations where law enforcement will only voluntarily release footage when they think it makes them look good or supports their version of events.”

Disputed law

The killing of 18-year-old Peoples at the soccer park in Homewood last month, has sparked protests and prompted attacks lobbed by the family’s legal team and the state lawmaker who sponsored the 2023 bodycam law.

Homewood police said they were investigating a parked car and smelled marijuana. Police said Peoples tried to grab a gun following a struggle with a police officer, who then shot him dead.

Leroy Maxwell, an attorney for the family, has said that a private investigator found that Peoples was unarmed and shot once in the back.

The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency is investigating the shooting. That’s standard practice when an officer injures or kills someone.

And as they have in other cases, state police said they can’t show the footage to the public or to the Peoples family in order to protect their investigation.

Maxwell, the family attorney, noted that the state police cited the 2023 law, sponsored by state Rep. Juandalynn Givan, D-Birmingham, when denying their request to see the video. The law says police may choose to show families bodycam footage, but provides no requirement they do so.

Givan called a press conference and said she believes the family should see the footage. But she blamed Maxwell for the denial, saying investigators haven’t shared it because of statements and court filings by the attorney.

“Representative Givan is putting up smoke and mirrors in an attempt to distract from the fact that she is solely responsible for the Peoples’ family not being able to view body cam footage,” Maxwell said in response.

Weak law

Even before the state supreme court ruling and the 2023 bodycam law, Alabamians rarely got to view the footage with police denying requests by citing an exemption to the Alabama Open Records Act protecting records related to investigations.

Gunita Singh, a staff attorney with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, says that Alabama, compared to other states, has “one of the weaker body-worn camera access laws in the country.” Her comment recognizes a 2021 story by The Hill that included Alabama among the 9 states with “the strictest rules on releasing bodycam videos.”

The Alabama State Supreme Court that year ruled, by an 8-1 vote, that bodycam footage is not a public record.

Tom Parker, the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court at the time, was the lone dissent. He wrote that the ruling “shrinks the right of the people of Alabama to the vanishing point.

“After today, as to law-enforcement agencies at least, the statute might as well be titled the Closed Records Act,” Parker wrote.

Two years later, the Alabama Legislature passed Givan’s bill into law, allowing an individual or a personal representative who appears in a body camera or dash camera video to send a written request to the law enforcement agency to view relevant portions of the video. But the law does not obligate law enforcement to allow anyone to view the video, nor does it require the agency to provide a reason for denial.

The issue has played out in cases across Alabama. National civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who joined the Peoples family at a press conference last week, has repeatedly come to the state, demanding the release of footage when Black men have been killed.

Nearly two years ago, Crump made the same call in Mobile after the death of Jawan Dallas following an altercation with two police officers in Theodore. Police responded to complaints of someone trying to break into a mobile home. They found Dallas, 36, in a car blocks away. He was killed after being struck with a Taser following a struggle.

The family got to see the video nearly five months later, only after a grand jury voted not to charge the officers.

After seeing the footage, the family said Mobile police had “murdered” Dallas.

“This is one of the worst videos of a police killing that I have ever witnessed,” said Harry Daniels, an attorney for the Dallas family, last November. “We know he begged for his life. He was saying and screaming, ‘I cannot breathe.’ He said, ‘I do not want to be George Floyd.’”

The public still hasn’t seen the video.

Sometimes law enforcement will release video, most often when the video confirms there was a weapon.

In 2018, following numerous protests, the Alabama Attorney General’s Office released mall surveillance footage after a Hoover police officer shot and killed EJ Bradford inside the Riverchase Galleria. The video was released two and half months after the shooting. It showed Bradford held a gun, even if he pulled it in self defense and was not the mall shooter.

More often police in Alabama do not share video without a court order.

Huntsville fought the release of a video of a shooting despite insisting the officer did nothing wrong and despite spending public money on lawyers for his murder trial. In 2021, over objections from the city, a judge in Huntsville finally ordered the release of bodycams showing Officer Ben Darby shooting a suicidal man. That happened three years after the shooting. Even after a jury watched the videos and found Darby guilty, the city still fought a request to release the tapes to the public.

Crump has gotten videos released in other states. In Memphis, Crump assisted in pressuring police to release video footage of police beating, punching and kicking Tyre Nichols in early 2023.

“What I want to do is leave people to see the video for themselves and they have to determine, if this was them or one of their loved ones, how would they characterize it?” Crump told reporters in Memphis two years ago.

But experts say Alabama stands out, as police can continue denying requests from media or the public for a host of police records, no matter the public controversy.

Blocking release

In Alabama, the top court took a different view than most other states.

For instance, in New Jersey, earlier this year, the State Supreme Court ruled that government officials cannot refuse to disclose the footage to people who are the subject of the recordings. The recordings themselves are considered public records subject to disclosure laws, the court determined.

The Alabama decision came after Lagniappe, a weekly newspaper based in Mobile, sued the Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office for videos and other records of a deputy shooting and killing 35-year-old Jonathan Victor in 2017 near the Alabama-Florida state line.

“Before Lagniappe a requestor at least had some leverage to argue the footage was public,” said Bailey. “That’s more or less off the table now.”

Bailey said from a legal perspective, the only hope is for either police to voluntarily release the footage or hope that it’s admitted as evidence in a court proceeding, making it a public record.

“But even then, sometimes the footage still isn’t released to the public until a judge finds the right conditions are met,” Bailey said.

He cited the repeated denials of releasing bodycam footage of the July 2018 death of 51-year-old Joseph Lee Pettaway, a Black man, after a Montgomery police dog went into a house, found Pettaway laying down, bit his thigh and tore his femoral artery.

It took three years for the family to see the video and it’s still not public.

In fighting to keep the video from going public in 2020, the city argued in court that it would cause “annoyance, embarrassment” for officers who were acting in good faith and could end up “facilitating civil unrest.”

In a 2022 decision blocking release of the video, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerusha Adams wrote that, “Due to its graphic nature and emotional impact, the footage from the police body cameras cannot be unseen, ignored, or easily set aside.”

Bailey said the judge repeatedly blocked the release because the footage could influence future jurors in a lawsuit.

He said that leaving the decision of whether to release the videos up to police incentives them to selectively release footage that tends to show them in a positive light.

“That’s just what this legal framework incentivizes, and it seems antithetical to the promise of accountability body cameras were meant to advance.”

In Madison in 2019, police declined to release footage showing police shoot and kill a man outside a gym. Police said they were investigating reports that Dana Fletcher was taking photos at Planet Fitness. The Madison County district attorney, in announcing that the officers would not be charged, showed still photos to reporters, photos that showed Fletcher holding a gun. The videos have never been made public.

Susan Hamill, a longtime professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, said there is very little chance that the Alabama Legislature or the state courts will change the law in favor of more transparency.

She said the best path for improving public access might be to challenge Alabama law in federal court, questioning the constitutionality of withholding bodycam footage

“If the law is not clarified this dilemma will continue,” Hamill said.

Legislative efforts

The Legislature could revise state law, but efforts in recent years have gone nowhere.

Sen. Merika Coleman, D-Birmingham, attempted to have state law recognize the footage as a public record in 2024, requiring its release within 30 days of a request to view it. Her legislation was defeated in the Alabama Senate Judiciary Committee, opposed by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers.

Givan got bipartisan support for her 2023 bill that lets police choose whether to share footage with family members. The law allows the disclosure of body camera footage to the “personal representative” of “an individual whose image or voice is the subject of the recording.”

Police can withhold it without stating a reason. However, most of the time they say the withholding is due to the sensitive nature of an “ongoing investigation.”

Hamill described the law as a classic “‘have it both ways’ approach,” with ultimately it being “almost completely up to the policing agency” on whether the bodycam video is released while also creating a “veneer that real disclosure to the family and ultimately to the public is available.”

“As long as the law exists as it is I believe the debate will continue with the agency having the upper hand under the ‘ongoing investigation’ reason, or what here appears as an excuse for not releasing the bodycam. Such debates do not inspire trust from the public.”

Givan has said that there was no political appetite for more.

State Rep. Allen Treadaway, R-Morris, said while lawmakers are open to see what changes can be made, he believes that they need to be careful about doing anything that would upend police investigations.

“We have to make sure we’re preserving evidence and not jeopardizing investigations,” said Treadaway, a former assistant police chief in Birmingham. “A tragedy has occurred. A life is lost. But I believe everyone wants a thorough investigation. Let it take its course. The investigative bureau needs to make sure they collect evidence and facts before they put something out there.”

Clopton, with the Mobile NAACP, had a simpler take.

“I can understand why you would hold if there was an accident by police, and a lot of things can happen,” he said. “But if there is nothing to hide, show the video.”