Montana Police Bodycam Laws (2026): No Statute, Court Fights

Montana has no statute dedicated to police body cameras at all, not for when they must be on, how long footage is kept, or how the public can see it. Access instead runs through Montana's constitutional right to know, Mont. Const. art. II, section 9, balanced against the constitutional right of privacy in section 10.

Information last verified on 2026-07-08. This article has not yet been reviewed by a licensed lawyer.

Jurisdiction scope: This article addresses Montana law, specifically Mont. Const. art. II, sections 9 and 10, the Criminal Justice Information Act, Mont. Code Ann. sections 44-5-103, 44-5-301 and 44-5-303, and Montana's public information statute, Mont. Code Ann. Title 2, chapter 6, part 10. It does not address whether a civilian may lawfully record an on-duty police officer; that question is settled separately and covered in Is It Illegal to Record Someone in Public?. This page addresses the reverse question: what happens to footage Montana police record of the public.

Does Montana require police to wear body cameras?

No, and adoption across the state is genuinely uneven. Montana has never passed a law requiring any city police department, county sheriff's office, or the Montana Highway Patrol to use body cameras. Some Montana agencies have used them for years; the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office, for example, has run a body camera program for over a decade. Others started far more recently: the Montana Highway Patrol did not equip any of its roughly 250 troopers with body cameras until a rollout that began in 2025, funded by a $4 million appropriation the Montana Legislature approved in 2023 and distributed over five years. Colonel Kurt Sager has said the cameras, which activate automatically when emergency lights engage or can be triggered manually, are meant to streamline report writing and capture incidents like foot pursuits away from a patrol vehicle. Whether a given Montana department has body cameras at all still depends entirely on that department's own budget and choices, not on state law.

Is there a Montana law that specifically governs bodycam footage?

No. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which tracks state-by-state access law nationally, states plainly in its Montana guide that the state "does not have law that addresses access to body-worn camera footage." That gap matters because it means a records custodian, a requester, and a court all have to reason by analogy from Montana's general public-records and criminal-justice-information law rather than from a rule written for bodycams specifically. The Montana Legislature has considered bodycam-specific proposals in past sessions, but no dedicated statute governing activation, retention, or release has been enacted.

How does Montana classify footage without a bodycam statute?

By default, footage recorded by a law enforcement officer likely falls under Montana's Criminal Justice Information Act, Title 44, chapter 5 of the Montana Code Annotated. Mont. Code Ann. section 44-5-103 is the definitions section, and it divides "criminal justice information" into two buckets. "Public criminal justice information" is a defined list: things like arrest records, booking photographs, bail records, jail rosters, court records, and information about convictions and deferred prosecutions. "Confidential criminal justice information" includes criminal investigative information, criminal intelligence information, and, as a catch-all, any other criminal justice information not clearly defined as public.

Which bucket a record falls into then decides how it can be released, and that rule lives in a different part of the chapter. Mont. Code Ann. section 44-5-301 places no restrictions on the dissemination of public criminal justice information. Mont. Code Ann. section 44-5-303(1) restricts confidential criminal justice information to criminal justice agencies, to those authorized by law to receive it, and to "those authorized to receive it by a district court upon a written finding that the demands of individual privacy do not clearly exceed the merits of public disclosure." Section 44-5-303(5) adds a separate route once a case is over: a prosecutor who receives a written request after a declination of prosecution, a dismissal, an acquittal, or an entry of judgment may file a declaratory judgment action asking the district court to authorize release.

Bodycam footage is not named in either list, so an agency deciding how to treat a request often defaults to the confidential side of that catch-all, particularly while an investigation is open, unless the constitutional balancing test described below pulls it back toward disclosure.

What is Montana's constitutional balancing test?

This is the mechanism that actually decides most contested requests. Mont. Const. art. II, section 9 states that no person shall be deprived of the right to examine documents of state government and its subdivisions, "except in cases in which the demand of individual privacy clearly exceeds the merits of public disclosure." Section 10 separately guarantees a right of individual privacy that cannot be infringed "without the showing of a compelling state interest." Montana courts apply these two provisions together, asking whether the person shown in a record had an actual, reasonable expectation of privacy, and if so, whether that interest clearly outweighs the public's interest in disclosure. Montana's Supreme Court has applied this test to favor disclosure of police-related records more than once. In Bozeman Daily Chronicle v. City of Bozeman Police Department, 260 Mont. 218, 859 P.2d 435 (1993), the court held that an officer has very little expectation of privacy in their own on-duty conduct, and that the public has a fundamental right to know what public employees are doing. A similar result followed in Great Falls Tribune Co. v. Cascade County Sheriff, 238 Mont. 103, 775 P.2d 1267 (1989), which affirmed an order requiring the City of Great Falls to release the names of the officers disciplined after a 1988 high-speed chase, together with which of them had been terminated and which had resigned. That order reached the officers' identities, not their disciplinary files as a whole. Neither case is about bodycam video specifically, but both signal the standard Montana courts are likely to apply to bodycam footage of an officer's own conduct: a weak privacy interest that takes a strong showing to overcome.

When must a Montana officer turn the camera on, and how long is footage kept?

There is no state answer to either question. Because Montana has no bodycam statute, activation triggers (when the camera must be recording) and retention periods (how long footage is stored before deletion) are set entirely by each agency's own policy. The Montana Highway Patrol's newly deployed system, for instance, activates automatically when a trooper's emergency lights come on or can be triggered by hand, but that is MHP policy, not a rule that binds any other Montana agency. Local government retention schedules, maintained through Montana's Local Government Records Committee, provide general guidance for how long local agencies must keep records, but there is no bodycam-specific numeric retention period set in state law.

A real example: the Billings traffic stop

On May 1, 2023, three Billings police officers, Matthew Bistline, Ian Busta, and Blaine Lane, stopped a vehicle on the city's north side. Body camera footage later showed the officers discussing how to get the driver's written consent to search the vehicle using what an attorney for the driver called a deceptive tactic. During part of that conversation, officers turned off or removed their body cameras, an act that itself became a central fact in the case once other footage and internal records surfaced it. Yellowstone County Attorney Scott Twito's office dismissed the resulting case and reviewed roughly 140 to 180 other cases involving the same three officers; about 49 were ultimately dismissed. Bistline was not reinstated after arbitration, and Busta and Lane were disciplined. The footage itself only became public after MTN News petitioned Yellowstone County District Court for its release, which is the route Mont. Code Ann. section 44-5-303(1) provides for confidential criminal justice information, because no Montana statute sets an automatic release timeline for bodycam video. The case shows both halves of Montana's bodycam gap: no state law keeps a camera on, and no state law guarantees a fast route to the footage when it goes off.

What happens if a Montana agency refuses to release footage?

Start with Montana's general public information statute, which does give a requester a defined process even though no bodycam law does. Mont. Code Ann. section 2-6-1003(1) gives every person the right to examine and obtain a copy of any public information held by a public agency. Mont. Code Ann. section 2-6-1006 sets the response rules, and they are not the same for every agency: a public agency that is not a local government must acknowledge a request within 5 business days and, where the request is for a record that is single, specific, clearly identifiable, and readily available, provide it within 5 working days of that acknowledgment. That deadline reaches a state agency like the Montana Highway Patrol. It does not reach a city police department or a county sheriff's office, which are local governments and are required under section 2-6-1006(2) only to respond in a timely manner.

If the agency refuses, Mont. Code Ann. section 2-6-1009 requires it to give the requester a written explanation of the denial, lets the requester file a complaint in district court under the Montana Rules of Civil Procedure, and allows costs and reasonable attorney fees to a person who prevails in an action brought to enforce rights under Article II, section 9 of the Montana Constitution. That fee provision is the practical lever for anyone weighing whether a suit is worth filing.

The catch specific to bodycam video is what counts as public information in the first place. Section 2-6-1002(11) defines public information to exclude confidential information that must be protected from disclosure under applicable law, so an agency treating footage as confidential criminal justice information will point the requester back to Mont. Code Ann. section 44-5-303(1), where release runs through a district court finding that the demands of individual privacy do not clearly exceed the merits of public disclosure. That is the petition MTN News filed in the Billings case above.

So what Montana lacks is not a statutory route, it is a bodycam-specific one: no dedicated release process for footage, no bodycam response deadline, and no penalty aimed at an agency that sits on video. See the Police Bodycam Laws by State hub for how states with a specific bodycam statute typically build in a response deadline that Montana currently lacks.

Disclaimer

This article provides general legal information about Montana law governing police body cameras and public access to footage, as verified on 2026-07-08. It does not constitute legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Readers should consult a lawyer licensed in Montana for advice about a specific records request or incident.

Related articles

• Police Bodycam Laws by State: the complete hub
• Is It Illegal to Record Someone in Public?
• Montana Recording Laws: Announcement Exception, Penalties, and AI Deepfakes

Last updated: 2026-07-08. Statutes cited reflect their in-force version as of 2026-07-08.

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