Arkansas Police Body Camera Laws: Public Records Access

Arkansas has no statewide law requiring police departments to use body cameras, and no bodycam-specific access statute. Requests for footage run through the general Arkansas Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Ark. Code Ann. § 25-19-105, with one narrow exception for recordings depicting an officer's death.

This guide is part of our Police Bodycam Laws by State series.

Jurisdiction scope: This article addresses Arkansas state law on police body-worn cameras: the absence of a statewide mandate, public-records access under the Arkansas FOIA, and the one camera-specific confidentiality statute on the books. It does not address individual department policies, which vary by city and county, or a civilian's right to record police, which is covered separately in our guide to recording laws.

Does Arkansas require police departments to use body cameras?

No. Arkansas has no statute requiring any law enforcement agency, state or local, to purchase or deploy body-worn cameras. Whether the Arkansas State Police, a county sheriff's office, or a city police department uses cameras, and what its activation policy says, is a decision made by that agency alone. The closest Arkansas has come to a statewide mandate was House Bill 1219, filed in January 2025, which would have required every law enforcement agency and public entity employing officers to provide body-worn cameras and record all official interactions with the public by December 31, 2026. Representative Scott Richardson withdrew the bill on February 6, 2025, before it reached a committee vote, according to the Arkansas State Legislature's bill tracker. Arkansas is not among the handful of states (Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Carolina) that require statewide bodycam use. Many individual Arkansas departments have equipped officers with cameras on their own initiative, but coverage and activation rules differ from one jurisdiction to the next.

How the Arkansas FOIA treats bodycam footage

Arkansas's Freedom of Information Act starts from a presumption of openness. Ark. Code Ann. § 25-19-105(a)(1)(A) makes "all public records" open to inspection and copying, and copying "through image capture, including still and moving photography and video and digital recording" is expressly permitted once a record is available, according to the Arkansas Attorney General's Freedom of Information Handbook, 21st edition, which reprints the statute in full. Body camera and dashcam video qualify as records because they document law enforcement's performance of an official function. In practice, though, most footage tied to an arrest, a use-of-force incident, or any other active matter is withheld under § 25-19-105(b)(6), which exempts "undisclosed investigations by law enforcement agencies of suspected criminal activity." That exemption applies only while the investigation is open; once a case is closed, the same footage generally becomes available on request, subject to redaction for exempt material such as the identity of an undercover officer or a confidential informant. Agencies may also charge a reasonable per-copy fee for producing the video.

The one Arkansas statute written specifically for camera footage

Arkansas does have a single camera-specific statute, but it addresses a narrow situation: the death of a law enforcement officer. Ark. Code Ann. § 12-6-701 defines "record" to include "a photograph, video recording, or audio recording, including any audio or video footage captured on a body-worn camera or a dashboard camera," and then declares that a record depicting or recording the death of a law enforcement officer is confidential and exempt from FOIA disclosure, according to Act 531 of 2017, the act that created the section. Automatic access, without a court petition, is limited to a defined set of people: a family member of the deceased officer (including a minor child of at least 14 with a parent's written consent and supervision), the employing agency or another agency conducting the official death investigation, the Division of Arkansas State Police, the FBI, prosecuting attorneys and their staff, and defense counsel or civil litigation attorneys through the discovery process. Access is not limited to that list, though: the statute separately lets any other person or entity petition the circuit court in the county where the record is located for access on a showing of good cause, weighing factors such as the public's interest in evaluating the officer's conduct, whether a compelling public interest favors disclosure, the severity of any privacy intrusion, and whether the information is available elsewhere. Outside of this specific scenario, Arkansas has no statute that singles out bodycam footage for special confidentiality or special openness; general FOIA law governs everything else.

How long does Arkansas keep bodycam footage?

The Arkansas FOIA sets no retention period of its own. The leading case is Daugherty v. Jacksonville Police Department, 2012 Ark. 264, in which a driver who requested dashcam recordings of her traffic stop was told the Jacksonville Police Department had already purged them on its routine 45-day cycle. The Arkansas Supreme Court agreed with her "that there is no specific retention period for public records set forth in the Act," and it affirmed the trial court's finding that the purge, which the department explained as a way to keep space free on its server, was not a negligent FOIA violation on the record she had made, according to the court's opinion.

That is narrower than "there is no retention law in Arkansas." A separate statute, Ark. Code Ann. § 14-2-204, requires municipalities to keep closed municipal police case files for felony and Class A misdemeanor offenses for seven years after the case closes, or permanently, with records related to crimes of violence as defined by § 5-42-203 kept permanently; incident, offense, and accident reports must be kept for three years. The requester in Daugherty argued that this statute covered the purged recordings, and the Supreme Court did not reject that argument on the merits. It refused to reach it because she raised it for the first time on appeal, saying it was "precluded from addressing the question of whether a violation of a statute, such as section 14-2-204, necessarily implicates a violation of the FOIA." Whether a city department may purge case-file video on a 45-day schedule is therefore an open question in Arkansas rather than settled law. The same opinion notes in a footnote that the state's information-systems director sets retention standards for the electronic records of state agencies under Ark. Code Ann. § 25-18-702.

Timing matters more than motive. Quoting an Attorney General opinion with approval, the Daugherty court noted that destroying police department documents "would violate the FOIA only if the documents were destroyed after a request for access to the documents had been presented to the Department," and that a negligent violation of the FOIA is a Class C misdemeanor under Ark. Code Ann. § 25-19-104. A routine purge that happens after your request has been presented is a potential violation regardless of whether the agency was trying to defeat the request. The same Attorney General opinion adds that destroying a public record with the requisite intent is tampering with a public record under Ark. Code Ann. § 5-54-121, a felony. Destruction can also implicate spoliation-of-evidence rules in related litigation.

Watch out: If you want Arkansas bodycam footage preserved, don't wait. The FOIA sets no retention period, and the department in Daugherty purged its recordings automatically every 45 days. Submit a written FOIA request, or ask the agency in writing to preserve the specific recording, as soon as possible after an incident. Under the Attorney General opinion the Supreme Court quoted in Daugherty, it is destruction after a request has been presented that turns a routine purge into a potential FOIA violation.

Officer accountability: activation and tampering

Because Arkansas has no statewide bodycam statute, it also has no state law addressing what happens when an officer fails to turn on a camera or tampers with footage. That stands in contrast to states like Colorado, which impose mandatory discipline and evidentiary consequences for a failure to activate. In Arkansas, activation requirements and the consequences for violating them are set by each department's use-of-force and equipment policies, enforced through internal affairs and ordinary personnel discipline rather than a statute. A pattern of destroyed or missing footage can still be raised in civil litigation or a criminal case through general spoliation-of-evidence doctrine, as the requester attempted in the Daugherty case, but Arkansas law does not create a bodycam-specific presumption against an officer the way some other states do. Her destruction claim failed, but the same appeal produced two rulings that help the next requester. The Supreme Court held that an agency may not refuse a request as too broad or burdensome when the request is specific enough for the custodian to locate the records with reasonable effort, and that a copying charge may not include agency personnel time, which struck down the $2,475.90 deposit the department had demanded.

Is a civilian allowed to record the police in Arkansas?

Arkansas is a one-party consent state for recording conversations, so a bystander generally does not need an officer's permission to record an encounter in public. This is a separate legal question from what this page covers. For a full explanation of the right to record law enforcement, see Is It Illegal to Record Someone?

More Arkansas Laws

• Arkansas Data Privacy Laws
• Arkansas Drone Laws
• Arkansas Recording Laws