Maine Police Bodycam Laws (2026): No Mandate & Records Access

Maine has no statute requiring any law enforcement agency to use body cameras. A 2019 bill to mandate them died in the Legislature, so adoption, activation rules, and retention are left entirely to each department's own policy, while footage access runs through Maine's Freedom of Access Act.

Jurisdiction scope: This article addresses Maine law governing police body cameras, specifically the absence of a statewide use mandate, and general public-records access under Maine's Freedom of Access Act (1 M.R.S. § 401 et seq., with the operative right of inspection at § 408-A) and the intelligence and investigative record information exemption (16 M.R.S. § 804). It does not address whether a civilian may record a Maine police officer, a different, already-settled question under Maine's one-party consent law; see Is It Illegal to Record Someone?. For other states, see the Police Bodycam Laws hub.

Does Maine require police departments to use body cameras?

No. Unlike roughly eight other states, Maine has never enacted a law requiring law enforcement agencies to equip officers with body-worn cameras. The closest the Legislature came was LD 636 (129th Legislature, 2019), An Act To Require Law Enforcement Officers To Wear Body Cameras, which would have required every Maine agency to equip its officers with body cameras recording during law-enforcement encounters starting January 1, 2021.

Lawmakers did not pass that mandate. There was no separate companion bill: LD 636 itself was amended, by Committee Amendment C-A (S-236), from an equipment mandate into a resolve that would have established a nine-member work group chaired by the Attorney General to study body-camera best practices and report back by March 1, 2020. That amended resolve was never enacted either. The official bill history records LD 636's final disposition as "Died Upon Conclusion of the 129th Legislature, Nov 16, 2020," so neither the equipment mandate nor the work group ever became law, and no work group was ever convened. No later bill has revived a statewide equipment requirement, so whether a given Maine department uses body cameras, and on what terms, remains a local budget and policy decision.

How common are body cameras among Maine police without a mandate?

Adoption has grown substantially even without a law requiring it. A 2024 study by the Maine Statistical Analysis Center, working with the Maine Attorney General's Office, surveyed law enforcement agencies statewide and found about 70% were already using body-worn cameras, another 21% were considering adopting them, and only 8% had neither used nor planned to use them.

Cost was the recurring obstacle agencies without cameras cited. Nearly two-thirds of departments that had adopted the technology reported annual costs of $10,000 or less, but smaller and rural departments described upfront and ongoing storage costs as a real barrier without state funding attached to a mandate. The same report recommended against imposing a statewide requirement, warning that an unfunded mandate would be too burdensome, and urged the state instead to address inconsistent retention and release practices from one department to the next.

How long do Maine police departments keep body-camera footage?

There is no statewide answer. Because Maine has no bodycam statute, retention periods are set individually by each law enforcement agency's own policy rather than by a day-count fixed in state law. The 2024 Maine Statistical Analysis Center report specifically flagged this as a gap, noting a lack of consistency and clarity regarding how long videos should be retained and when and how they should be released from one department to the next. A person who wants to know how long footage from a specific stop or incident will be kept needs to ask that department directly, since Maine's public-safety statutes do not answer the question the way they do in states with a dedicated body-camera law.

Can the public get a copy of body-camera footage in Maine?

Yes, but through Maine's general public-records law rather than a camera-specific statute. The Maine Freedom of Access Act (1 M.R.S. § 401 et seq.) presumes government records, including police video, are public unless a specific exemption applies. The section doing that work is 1 M.R.S. § 408-A, which provides that, except as otherwise provided by statute, a person has the right to inspect and copy any public record within a reasonable time of asking; § 401 is the act's declaration of policy and rules of construction rather than the operative grant. Two exemptions do most of the work in practice.

First, footage reviewed as part of an officer's personnel file, for example when a department examines a recording to decide whether an officer violated policy, can be withheld under FOAA's personnel-records exemption. Second, footage that is part of an open criminal investigation can be withheld as intelligence and investigative record information under 16 M.R.S. § 804, which lets a criminal justice agency decline to disclose an investigative record where release carries a reasonable possibility of specified harms, such as interfering with a prosecution, endangering a witness, or revealing an investigative technique. Once an investigation closes, that basis for withholding weakens, though a custodian may still redact portions on privacy grounds.

A requester who disputes an agency's denial can contact the Public Access Ombudsman within the Maine Attorney General's office, created under 5 M.R.S. § 200-I, which issues advisory opinions on freedom-of-access disputes, though its recommendations are not binding on the agency.

Has the absence of a bodycam law mattered in a real case?

In May 2017, York County Sheriff's deputies shot and killed Chad Dionne at his home in Arundel after, according to investigators, he pointed a gun at them; the Maine Attorney General's Office found the shooting legally justified. At the time, York County's deputies carried neither body cameras nor dashboard cameras, so no video existed to show what happened during the encounter. Dionne's mother, Brenda Dionne, later became a public advocate for statewide body-camera adoption, telling a Portland television station that the family had only the investigators' report and "nobody to tell us the other side of the story." The York County Sheriff's Office has since added dash cameras and has said it plans to add body cameras once funding allows, illustrating how, without a state mandate or dedicated funding stream, adoption in Maine still depends on individual county budgets years after the technology became common elsewhere.

Separately, Maine's exemption-heavy FOAA has drawn its own criticism. After Portland police declined to release 2017 dashcam video from a police shooting, First Amendment attorney Sigmund Schutz observed that Maine's public-records law had, in his words, "turned into Swiss cheese," with broad, overlapping exemptions that let agencies interpret close cases toward nondisclosure.

This article provides general legal information about Maine's approach to police body cameras and public-records law. It is not legal advice. Maine law was reviewed as of July 2026, and legislative activity on this topic continues; consult a Maine-licensed attorney or the Public Access Ombudsman for guidance on a specific request.

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