Michigan Police Bodycam Laws: Retention & Public Records

Michigan has no statute requiring police departments to use body cameras, but any agency that does must follow the Law Enforcement Body-Worn Camera Privacy Act, MCL 780.311 to 780.318, which sets a 30-day minimum retention period for evidentiary recordings and layers specific access rules on top of the state's Freedom of Information Act.

This guide is part of our Police Bodycam Laws by State series. It covers Michigan's retention rule, how public records requests for footage work, and what happens when a camera stops recording before a critical moment.

Jurisdiction scope: This article addresses Michigan law governing police-worn body cameras under the Law Enforcement Body-Worn Camera Privacy Act, MCL 780.311 to 780.318, and its interaction with the Michigan Freedom of Information Act. It does not address whether a civilian may record an on-duty officer, which is a separate question covered in our guide on recording someone without consent.

Does Michigan Require Police to Wear Body Cameras?

No. Michigan has no law compelling police departments, sheriffs' offices, or the Michigan State Police to equip officers with body cameras. Adoption is a local policy and budget decision. What the state does regulate is what happens once an agency chooses to use them: since Act 85 of 2017 took effect, MCL 780.318 has required any Michigan law enforcement agency that uses body-worn cameras to adopt a written policy addressing use, storage, and access before deploying them.

The Michigan State Police provide a useful example of how adoption plays out without a mandate. MSP began rolling out cameras to road patrol troopers starting in early 2022 and had equipped roughly 1,700 troopers statewide by the end of that year, a decision driven by department policy and funding rather than a statutory command. Smaller municipal departments and county sheriffs across Michigan have adopted bodycams on a similarly uneven timeline, and pending legislation that would create a statewide mandate for certain officers has been introduced in the Legislature but has not passed as of this writing.

How Long Must Michigan Agencies Retain Bodycam Footage?

MCL 780.316(1) sets Michigan's retention floor at 30 days from the date a recording is made, but that floor reaches only an evidentiary audio and video recording. MCL 780.312(b) defines that term as a recording of an incident or encounter, including a crime, arrest, citation, search, use of force incident, or confrontational encounter with a citizen, that may be materially useful for investigative or prosecutorial purposes. Routine patrol footage that captures none of those things falls outside the definition, so the Act imposes no minimum retention period on it and the agency's own written policy under MCL 780.318 controls how long it is kept. Anyone trying to preserve ordinary, non-evidentiary video should act on that assumption rather than relying on a 30-day statutory cushion.

For recordings the floor does reach, that 30-day baseline extends automatically in two situations, and both extensions are drafted more broadly than the floor itself: subsections (2) and (3) speak to audio and video recordings generally, without the evidentiary qualifier. First, if a recording becomes the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation, an ongoing internal investigation, a criminal prosecution, or a civil action, the agency must retain it until that investigation or proceeding is complete, however long that takes. Second, if a recording is relevant to a formal complaint filed against a law enforcement officer or agency, MCL 780.316(3) requires retention for at least 3 years from the date of the recording.

The statute also addresses what happens when footage goes missing after the retention period lapses, or is lost to a technical failure or human error: it does not, by itself, create a legal presumption in favor of either the prosecution or the defense in a resulting criminal or civil case. That detail matters in practice, since it means a missing recording does not automatically help or hurt either side in court; the significance of a gap in the footage still has to be argued on the facts of the individual case.

Can the Public Get a Copy of Bodycam Footage in Michigan?

Michigan does not declare bodycam footage categorically open or categorically closed. Instead, MCL 780.315(1) carves out a time-limited exemption from the Michigan Freedom of Information Act: a recording retained in connection with an ongoing criminal investigation or an ongoing internal investigation is not a public record, but only to the extent that disclosure would do one of seven enumerated things. Those are interfering with law enforcement proceedings; depriving a person of the right to a fair trial or impartial adjudication; constituting an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy; disclosing the identity of a confidential source, or confidential information furnished only by such a source in a criminal investigation; disclosing law enforcement investigative techniques or procedures; endangering the life or physical safety of law enforcement personnel; or disclosing information regarding a crime victim in violation of enumerated sections of the William Van Regenmorter crime victim's rights act.

The exemption is time-limited, since it runs only while an investigation is ongoing, but the grounds themselves are not narrow. The first, interference with law enforcement proceedings, is broad enough that agencies commonly rely on it to withhold footage for the life of an investigation. Two of the grounds are meanwhile narrower than they may sound: the sixth protects law enforcement personnel specifically rather than the public at large, and the seventh is keyed to particular sections of the crime victim's rights act rather than to victim or witness information generally. A separate provision of the general FOIA statute, MCL 15.243(1)(v), lets an agency withhold footage connected to a civil action where the person requesting it and the agency are both parties to that lawsuit, and MCL 780.315(2) cross-references that provision directly.

Once an investigation closes, or where no investigation-related exemption applies in the first place, a bodycam recording is treated like any other public record and is subject to a standard Michigan FOIA request submitted to the agency's FOIA coordinator. The Michigan State Police, for example, process bodycam and dashcam requests through its Records Resource Section using the same FOIA intake process used for incident reports and other records.

What Happens When a Camera Doesn't Capture the Critical Moment?

Michigan's statute does not set a specific disciplinary consequence for an officer whose camera fails to activate, and that gap became a matter of public scrutiny after the April 4, 2022, death of Patrick Lyoya, a 26-year-old motorist who was fatally shot by a Grand Rapids police officer following a traffic stop and struggle. The officer's body camera stopped recording shortly before the fatal shot; Grand Rapids Police Chief Eric Winstrom told reporters he believed the camera's three-second deactivation button was pressed inadvertently during the physical struggle rather than deliberately by the officer. The department released the bodycam video, along with dashcam, doorbell, and cell phone footage, nine days later, on April 13, 2022, following public pressure and community protests, and Michigan State Police and the Kent County Prosecutor's Office separately investigated the shooting.

The episode illustrates a structural point about Michigan's law: MCL 780.316 governs how long footage must be kept once it exists, but neither that section nor MCL 780.315 imposes a specific statutory activation requirement or penalty for a camera that stops recording during an encounter. Any activation and discipline requirements come from the individual department's own written policy under MCL 780.318, not from a uniform statewide rule.

Recording Police Versus Police Recording You

This guide addresses the opposite question from most of the recording-law content on this site: what happens when police record you, not whether you can record police. Michigan is a one-party consent state for recording conversations, and that rule governs civilians, not an officer's on-duty bodycam. For the separate question of whether you can legally record someone, including police, see our guide on whether it's illegal to record someone without their consent.

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