Ohio Police Body Camera Laws: Access & Public Records

Ohio has no statewide law requiring police departments to use body cameras, but once an agency records footage, R.C. 149.43(A)(17) treats it as a public record subject to specific, narrow redactions, and, since 2025, a processing fee.

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

Jurisdiction scope: This article addresses Ohio state law governing police body-worn and dashboard camera recordings: the public-records treatment under R.C. 149.43, the restricted-portions redaction scheme, the 2025 fee law, and relevant Ohio Supreme Court precedent. It does not address a civilian's right to record law enforcement, which is covered separately in our guide to recording laws.

Does Ohio require police departments to use body cameras?

No. Ohio has never passed a law requiring every law enforcement agency in the state to purchase or deploy body cameras. A bill known as Andre's Law, named for Andre Hill, a Columbus man shot and killed by an officer in December 2020 who had not activated his body camera before firing, would have required every Ohio agency to equip officers with body and dashboard cameras by July 1, 2023 and would have required agencies to release unedited footage of a misconduct complaint within 21 days. The bill, House Bill 367, was referred to the House Criminal Justice Committee but never received a floor vote in either chamber and did not clear the legislature as state law. Columbus itself adopted a local version of Andre's Law by city ordinance in February 2021, requiring city officers to activate cameras during stops, pursuits, uses of force, and other enforcement actions, but that ordinance binds only the Columbus Division of Police, not agencies elsewhere in the state. As a result, whether an Ohio department uses body cameras at all, and its activation rules, remain a matter of local budget and policy rather than state command.

Is Ohio police bodycam footage a public record?

Yes, with defined exceptions. Once a recording exists, it is treated as a public record under Ohio's Public Records Act, R.C. 149.43, the same general presumption of openness that applies to other government records. Sub. House Bill 425 added R.C. 149.43(A)(17), effective April 8, 2019, which defines specific "restricted portions" of a body-worn camera or dashboard camera recording that an agency may redact, blur, or mute before release, rather than creating a blanket exemption for the whole recording, according to the ACLU of Ohio's summary of the law. Ohio agencies can also rely on the state's general confidential law enforcement investigatory record exemption under R.C. 149.43(A)(2) to withhold footage entirely while a specific investigation remains active, the same exemption used for other police records, before the restricted-portions redaction rules even come into play.

What can Ohio police redact from bodycam footage?

R.C. 149.43(A)(17) lists 17 categories of content, subdivisions (a) through (q), that an agency may treat as a restricted, redactable portion of a recording: the image or identity of a child; the death of a person or a deceased person's body; the death of a correctional employee, youth services employee, peace officer, firefighter, paramedic, or other first responder in the line of duty; grievous bodily harm; grievous bodily harm to a first responder; an act of severe violence causing serious physical harm; an act of severe violence against a first responder; a person's nude body; protected health information; information that could identify a sex-offense, stalking, or domestic-violence victim; information that could identify a confidential source; personal information of a person who was not arrested, cited, or charged; proprietary tactical or contingency plans; a private, non-work conversation between officers; a non-official conversation between an officer and a member of the public; and the interior of a private residence or business not otherwise open to the public. Critically, several of these categories carry a built-in exception: the restriction on death, grievous bodily harm, or severe violence does not apply where that harm was caused by a peace officer, a correctional employee, or a youth services employee using force in the course of duty. That means the single most consequential category of footage, video of a person killed or seriously injured by an officer, cannot be withheld or blurred on the theory that it depicts a death or serious injury; the exemptions built for privacy protection do not shield an officer's own use of force from view.

What does it cost to get Ohio bodycam footage now?

Since early 2025, requesting bodycam footage in Ohio can come with a bill attached. House Bill 315, signed by Governor Mike DeWine on January 2, 2025 and effective April 2, 2025, allows, but does not require, a state or local law enforcement agency or a prosecuting attorney's office to charge the requester the actual cost of preparing a video record for inspection or production, "not to exceed seventy-five dollars per hour of video produced, nor seven hundred fifty dollars total."

Read the hourly figure carefully, because the statute meters it to the length of the footage released, not to the staff hours spent working on it. Under the enacted text, a 20-minute clip tops out at roughly $25 no matter how many hours of review and blurring the agency puts in, and the $750 ceiling is reached only at ten hours of released video.

"Actual cost," for video records, is defined to cover reviewing, blurring or otherwise obscuring, redacting, uploading, or producing the recording, including the storage medium, staff time, and other relevant overhead needed to comply with the request. The agency must give the requester an estimated actual cost within five business days of receiving the public records request. It may require that estimate to be paid up front only if it has written that requirement into its own public records policy; where a policy does impose prepayment, the agency's obligation to produce the video begins once the estimate is paid in full. If the true cost runs above the estimate, the agency may bill the difference only if it told the requester in advance that the cost could come in higher, and it may never charge more than 20 percent above the estimate. Because the fee is optional rather than mandatory, whether a particular Ohio department charges for a bodycam request, and how much, varies by agency.

A real example: the Ta'Kiya Young shooting

Ohio's officer-use-of-force exception to the redaction rules played out quickly in a high-profile 2023 case. On August 24, 2023, a Blendon Township, Franklin County officer, Connor Grubb, fatally shot 21-year-old Ta'Kiya Young outside a Kroger store during a theft investigation after Young's car began moving toward him. Blendon Township released the bodycam footage of the shooting on September 1, 2023, about a week after the incident, according to PBS NewsHour's coverage of the release. Because the footage depicted a death caused by an officer's use of force, R.C. 149.43(A)(17)'s restricted-portions redactions for death and severe violence did not apply to shield it from disclosure. Grubb was later charged with murder, manslaughter, and assault in August 2024; his trial began in November 2025, and a jury found him not guilty on all charges on November 21, 2025.

Can Ohio redact an officer's identity from bodycam video?

Sometimes, and a 2025 Ohio Supreme Court decision shows how. In State ex rel. GateHouse Media Ohio Holdings II, Inc., doing business as the Columbus Dispatch, v. Columbus Division of Police, 2025-Ohio-5243, decided November 25, 2025, the newspaper sought bodycam and dashcam footage in which the Columbus Division of Police had redacted an officer's identifying information, arguing the officer qualified as a crime victim under Ohio's constitutional victims' rights provision, known as Marsy's Law, and its implementing statute, R.C. 2930.07. The Ohio Supreme Court agreed that an on-duty officer can be a "victim" under Marsy's Law when a crime is committed against the officer personally, upheld the redaction, and denied the newspaper's request for a writ of mandamus. The ruling means that identity redactions for officers depicted as victims sit alongside the R.C. 149.43(A)(17) content-based redactions as a separate, constitutionally grounded basis Ohio agencies can use to withhold identifying details even from otherwise disclosable footage.

Is it illegal to record police in Ohio?

That is a different question from the one this page answers. Ohio generally recognizes a person's right to record an on-duty officer performing public duties in a public place, as covered in our separate guide to recording laws linked above. The rules on this page apply only to footage the police themselves record and to the public's ability to obtain a copy of it afterward.

More Ohio Laws

• Ohio Data Privacy Laws
• Ohio Drone Laws
• Ohio Recording Laws