Hawaii Police Bodycam Laws: Public Records & Retention Rules

Hawaii has no statute generally requiring police to wear body cameras, yet all four county police departments adopted them anyway between 2015 and 2020 through local policy. Access to footage runs through Hawaii's general public-records law, not a bodycam-specific statute, and the state's first statutory camera duty, an activation requirement during vehicular pursuits, does not take effect until January 1, 2027.

This page covers whether Hawaii police must use body cameras, how long footage is kept, and how the public can request a copy. It does not cover whether a civilian may record an on-duty Hawaii officer, a separate and well-settled question addressed on Recording Law's guide to recording police.

Does Hawaii require police to wear body cameras?

Not as a general matter. Hawaii has never enacted a law requiring its police departments to equip their officers with body cameras. A 2015 bill in the state legislature would have mandated statewide adoption, but budget concerns and privacy objections kept it from passing, and Hawaii has operated without a general body-camera statute ever since. Hawaii's four police departments are county agencies, and no state law directs them toward a uniform body-camera policy. The state does have a Law Enforcement Standards Board, established in 2018 within the Department of the Attorney General for administrative purposes under HRS Chapter 139, but its statutory duties run to setting minimum employment standards, certifying and decertifying officers, and setting training curriculum, along with authority to review and recommend statewide law enforcement policies rather than to impose a camera program on the counties.

That picture changes at the margins in 2027. Act 210 of the 2025 session added HRS § 139-13, Hawaii's vehicular-pursuit statute, and it carries the first body-worn-camera duty written into Hawaii law. Beginning January 1, 2027, an officer who initiates a pursuit "shall immediately activate all emergency warning lights, siren, headlights, motor vehicle recorder, and body-worn camera," under § 139-13(b)(5). From the same date, every law enforcement agency must file an annual report of its pursuits with the Department of the Attorney General stating, among other things, whether "a body-worn camera was worn and active for the duration of the pursuit," under § 139-13(f)(5), and the Attorney General must publish that data on its website in machine-readable form. This is an activation-and-reporting requirement confined to vehicular pursuits, not a general mandate that Hawaii officers wear cameras, and it is prospective: none of it binds an agency before January 1, 2027.

Despite the absence of a general mandate, every county adopted body cameras anyway, through each department's own internal policy rather than legislation: Kauai Police Department in 2015, Maui Police Department in 2017, Honolulu Police Department beginning in 2018, and the Hawaii Police Department, covering Hawaii County (the Big Island), in November 2020. Because each program grew out of local policy rather than a shared statute, activation rules, which units carry cameras, and retention periods differ somewhat from island to island.

Is body camera footage a public record in Hawaii?

Hawaii has no statute written specifically for body camera video. A request for footage instead goes through the state's general public-records law, the Uniform Information Practices Act (UIPA), codified at HRS Chapter 92F. The UIPA starts from a presumption of openness: HRS § 92F-11(a) provides that all government records are open to public inspection unless access is restricted or closed by law, and § 92F-11(b) requires each agency, except as provided in § 92F-13, to make government records available for inspection and copying on request during regular business hours.

For law enforcement records, two exceptions come up most often, and both sit in the same exceptions section. HRS § 92F-13(1) lets an agency withhold information whose disclosure would be a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy. A separate paragraph of that same section, HRS § 92F-13(3), covers records that by their nature must be confidential in order for the government to avoid the frustration of a legitimate government function, which Hawaii's Office of Information Practices (OIP) has applied to active criminal investigations in past guidance. Because Hawaii lacks a bodycam-specific statute, whether a particular recording is released turns on how these general exceptions apply to that footage, not on a bright-line rule tied to where the camera was pointed.

How has Hawaii's public records office actually handled bodycam requests?

The clearest guidance on how Hawaii treats body camera video comes from OIP, the state office that administers and interprets the UIPA, rather than from the legislature. In a December 22, 2021 opinion, Op. Ltr. No. F22-01, OIP reviewed a request to the Kauai Police Department for body-worn camera recordings tied to a police report and an administrative complaint the requester had filed against five officers.

POLICE-K may deny Part III access under section 92F-22(1)(A), HRS, and Part II access under section 92F-13(1), HRS, to only the portions of BWC recordings of statements by witnesses that would identify those witnesses, to avoid a clearly unwarranted invasion of the witnesses' personal privacy. In this case, however, most of the recordings may be withheld to protect the witnesses' privacy. (Office of Information Practices, Op. Ltr. No. F22-01, Dec. 22, 2021, Brief Answer 3)

Two features of that opinion matter to anyone reading it as precedent. First, it arose from a request made under Part III of the UIPA, meaning the requester was seeking a record about himself, which is why the analysis runs through HRS § 92F-22(1)(A) alongside the Part II privacy exception. A member of the public asking for footage of someone else is in a different posture. Second, the outcome on these facts favored the department: OIP found that withholding practically the entire recordings was warranted to protect the witnesses' identities, because the requester could readily have determined who they were from their faces, voices, clothing, and surroundings.

OIP was nonetheless explicit that the conclusion should not be read to allow wholesale withholding of body camera recordings in every situation. Whether, and to what extent, a recording may be withheld has to be determined case by case, and OIP noted that the public interest can be far higher in other kinds of footage, such as recordings of officer shootings resulting in death or incidents involving high-ranking officials, than it was in the witness statements at issue there.

How long does Hawaii police keep body camera footage?

Because no Hawaii statute sets a retention period for body camera video, each county department's own written policy controls. Honolulu Police Department's policy, for example, sets a baseline retention period of 13 months from the date of recording for routine footage. That period extends substantially, to a minimum of 3 years, for recordings documenting a use of force or a citizen complaint against an officer, and footage with evidentiary value in a pending criminal or civil case is held for the applicable statute of limitations or until the case concludes, whichever is shorter.

Because retention is set by department policy rather than state law, Kauai, Maui, and Hawaii County's schedules are not guaranteed to match Honolulu's exactly. A records requester dealing with a non-Honolulu department should confirm the specific retention period, and the department's video-request process, directly with that department.

How fast can you actually get footage in Hawaii?

A formal legal right to request footage does not always translate into a fast, or even eventual, release. A Honolulu Civil Beat investigation published in August 2024 found that HPD had released body camera footage publicly in only 3 of 22 deadly police encounters since 2018, about 14% of cases. HPD attributed part of the gap to camera coverage itself: roughly 600 of the department's approximately 1,800 officers, largely those in administrative, specialized, or plainclothes roles, are not issued body cameras at all, and the investigation identified at least 7 deadly encounters involving officers who had no camera to activate in the first place. HPD also told reporters that footage is withheld when release would hamper an active investigation or the prosecution of a case, echoing the investigation-based exception that applies under the general UIPA analysis above.

Non-activation by camera-equipped officers is not without consequence at HPD. In one recent year covered by the same investigation, the department disciplined six officers, with four additional cases pending in arbitration, for failing to activate their cameras during an encounter.

A real case: the Wai'anae shooting

Body camera footage's evidentiary role showed clearly in the August 14, 2024 shooting of 60-year-old Alston Awong in Wai'anae, on Oahu. Awong assaulted his girlfriend, threatened neighbors with a rifle, and fired a stolen handgun into a home where several people, including two children, were sheltering, before an HPD officer arrived and shot him. Released body camera footage showed Awong standing in a doorway holding a gun and turning toward the officer after being ordered to drop it.

Honolulu Prosecuting Attorney Steve Alm reviewed the footage along with other evidence and, in August 2025, announced no charges would be filed against the officer, concluding the shooting was legally justified and describing the encounter as consistent with what he called "suicide by cop." The case shows how, once a Hawaii agency chooses to record and release footage, that footage can resolve an accountability question fairly directly, in contrast to the encounters in HPD's own data that were never recorded, or recorded but never released, at all.

For how other states handle bodycam mandates and public access, see Recording Law's Police Bodycam Laws hub.

This article provides general legal information about Hawaii's body camera policies and public-records rules as of mid-2026. It is not legal advice. For help with a specific records request, consult a Hawaii attorney or the relevant county police department's records division.

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