New Jersey Supreme Court Orders Release of Police Body Camera Footage Under OPRA in Fuster v. Township of Chatham

New Jersey's highest court has handed open-records requesters a significant win on police body camera footage. On January 21, 2025, the Supreme Court of New Jersey ruled in Fuster v. Township of Chatham that body worn camera recordings are not categorically shielded from the public, and it ordered a township to release footage of a man's own statement to police.

The decision rejected the idea that footage involving a person who was never arrested or charged is automatically confidential. It is one of the clearest recent statements from a state high court on how a public records act applies to the body camera video that police agencies now generate by the millions of hours.

Information last verified on June 20, 2026.

What the Court Decided

The case arose from a May 2022 visit Antonio Fuster made to the Chatham Township Police Department. He reported that his special-needs child had accused an adult male relative of sexual misconduct, and an officer recorded the conversation on a body worn camera. After Fuster and his wife, Brianne Devine, reviewed the resulting police report and said it was inaccurate, Fuster filed an Open Public Records Act request for the written reports and the body worn camera video of his interview. A records clerk denied the request for the video.

The trial court and the Appellate Division both sided with the township. The Appellate Division concluded the footage was exempt under judicial case law's confidentiality protection for an uncharged person's law enforcement records, reported at 477 N.J. Super. 477 (App. Div. 2023). The Supreme Court granted certification and reversed.

The core holding turns on a definition. OPRA exempts "criminal investigatory records," which the statute defines at N.J.S.A. 47:1A-1.1 as a record "which is not required by law to be made, maintained or kept on file" that a law enforcement agency holds and that pertains to a criminal investigation. The Court reasoned that body worn camera video falls outside that definition, because the 2020 Body Worn Camera Law (BWCL), N.J.S.A. 40A:14-118.5, requires the footage to be made and kept. In the Court's words, even if such videos are held by police and pertain to investigations, "they are by definition not criminal investigatory records under OPRA because they are 'required by law' . . . 'to be made, maintained or kept on file.'"

The Uncharged-Person Exemption the Court Rejected

The township also argued the video was confidential under N.J.S.A. 47:1A-9(b), an OPRA provision stating that the act does not "abrogate or erode" any grant of confidentiality already established by the Constitution, statute, court rule, or judicial case law. The lower courts had rooted that argument in a 2016 Appellate Division decision, North Jersey Media Group Inc. v. Bergen County Prosecutor's Office, which treated records about a person not arrested or charged as automatically confidential.

The Supreme Court disagreed with the premise. It explained that the 2016 case was decided long after OPRA took effect and that the pre-OPRA cases it relied on did not actually create any automatic grant of confidentiality for all law enforcement records about a person who was never charged. "Before OPRA was enacted," the Court wrote, "judicial case law in New Jersey had not established or recognized any automatic grant of confidentiality" of that kind. Because no such grant existed, there was nothing for OPRA's preservation clause to protect, and the exemption did not apply.

This reasoning matters well beyond body cameras. The question of whether records about uncharged people are presumptively secret recurs across the public records landscape, from incident reports to 911 audio. Requesters frequently encounter blanket privacy denials, much like those who pursue access to records such as 911 call recordings, where the strength of any exemption depends on the specific statute rather than a general assumption of confidentiality.

Privacy and the Subject of the Recording

The township's last argument invoked the "citizen's reasonable expectation of privacy" language in N.J.S.A. 47:1A-1. New Jersey courts weigh that interest using the seven-factor test from Doe v. Poritz, 142 N.J. 1 (1995).

Applying those factors, the Court emphasized that the requester was not a curious third party but the subject of the video, and that the footage was "not a recording of the State's investigation, but a verbatim recording of Fuster's own complaint as he made it to the police." The Court noted that if Fuster wanted to publicize the underlying allegations, he could simply repeat them himself on camera, which limited any privacy interest of the accused relative. It also pointed to the state constitutional command that crime victims "shall be treated with fairness, compassion and respect," concluding that barring an alleged victim from inspecting the recording of their own statement would not honor that mandate. The result was a unanimous reversal, with the Court ordering release "under the circumstances of this case."

Because the holding is anchored to a requester seeking footage of their own statement, it is most powerful for people who appear in the recording. Anyone outside that category, including journalists and members of the public seeking footage of others, still faces the full OPRA exemption analysis the Court left in place.

Analysis: Why This Matters

The following analysis reflects the views of the Recording Law Editorial Team.

Fuster is consequential because of what it refuses to do. The township asked the Court to bless two broad shortcuts: treat all body camera video tied to an investigation as a criminal investigatory record, and treat all records about an uncharged person as automatically secret. A high court that wanted to limit disclosure could have taken either path. Instead, the Court tied the outcome to statutory text, holding that footage the Legislature required police to create cannot be swept into an exemption written for records that are not required by law to be made.

That textual move is the durable part of the decision. By keying the criminal-investigatory exemption to whether a record is "required by law" to exist, the Court drew a line that other body camera disputes can follow. As more states pass laws mandating that police record and retain body camera video, the same logic, that a mandated record is not an investigatory record exempt from disclosure, becomes available to requesters elsewhere, even though Fuster itself binds only New Jersey.

The limits deserve equal emphasis. The Court repeatedly framed its holding around the specific facts: a requester who was the subject of the footage, asking for a recording of his own words. It expressly declined to decide whether the Body Worn Camera Law's exemption provision displaces OPRA's other exemptions, leaving that fight for another case. Readers should not assume the ruling opens every body camera file to everyone. It does not.

The broader lesson for the public records world is methodological. Exemptions are creatures of text and history, not of intuition. The Court took apart a confidentiality rule that had been treated as settled and found it lacked the pre-OPRA foundation the lower courts assumed. That kind of scrutiny is exactly what open-government law is supposed to invite, and it is a reminder that the strength of any records denial, whether the records concern body cameras, autopsies, or deaths, depends on a real statute or precedent rather than habit. Those evaluating access to sensitive government records, from autopsy reports to death records held by the state, should expect custodians and courts to be held to the actual text of the exemptions they cite.

None of this is legal advice. Anyone facing a specific records denial or considering an OPRA or public-records lawsuit should consult a licensed attorney in their jurisdiction about their particular situation.