Daily Herald opinion: Unyielding unintended consequences: Even with good intentions, we have to be careful about regulating transparency

There is welcome and admirable intent in the concerns of law enforcement authorities as they wrestle with a technology-enabled trend that can turn individuals’ police interactions into fodder for public entertainment, humiliation or ridicule. The concerns have drawn the equally welcome attention of lawmakers, and we hope they can be addressed.

But it is also true that there is no simple response to the issue that both protects individuals’ interests and safeguards the public’s need to understand the performance and operations of key institutions.

Few thoughtful, reasonable people would dispute that it is repugnant and reprehensible for profit-seeking online content creators to “make money exploiting people’s worst days,” to quote Joe Leonas, the Lincolnshire chief of police and president of the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police.

Unfortunately, plenty of not-so-thoughtful and often patently unreasonable people are only too happy to get a belly laugh from the misfortunes of others who become involved with the police or take advantage of their shock value for their own purposes. The practice has a strong precedent in the popularity of such programs as “Cops,” MTV’s “Busted” and many more that send cameras along with police, then broadcast the most salacious, humorous or shocking interactions.

It is not exactly educational TV. As our Charles Keeshan and Susan Sarkauskas described in their Cops & Crime column last Friday, it can have devastatingly humiliating consequences. Because of that, officers like Leonas and ILACP are pressing lawmakers to take up legislation that would restrict the availability of police body camera footage.

One bill would let police deny FOIA requests from certain internet sites and social media channels. Another limits the release of body camera footage to people directly involved or their attorneys. Both have exemptions that protect the availability of material to the news media or appropriate legal entities

Such exemptions are a good start to a commendable mission. But they are only an optimistic start. They open a dangerous door. As representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union told our reporters, these bills may not guarantee every needed protection of the public’s interest, so they need broad, critical scrutiny.

Transparency issues are baked into the U.S. Constitution and countless state and federal laws precisely because a democracy cannot function satisfactorily without them. People need to be able to see not just the results of their leaders’ and institutions’ work but the details that produced them. We need to know how and why police operate as they do, as much as we need to know what documents our local officials use to justify their votes or what line items make up a local, state or federal budget.

We cannot deny that in some cases, the potential for misuse or unintended consequences complicates the optimum goal of open and unrestricted access to everything government agencies collect or produce. We are glad to see public agencies showing concern for the privacy and well-being of people they come in contact with. But we are not naive about the potential for certain agencies or government officials to take advantage of legal exemptions as an excuse to hide their work from the public or selectively control what the public or any concerned citizen can access.

If we are indeed to investigate legislative solutions for the very real detriments in the unintended consequences of some policies for certain individuals, we must not overlook this fundamental and overriding concern for the strength and success of the democracy as a whole.