January 13, 2023

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Below is a transcript. Please consider listening to our episodes as they are meant to be heard, not read. 

Sara Ganim:

In our first episode, we talked about how police messaging can sometimes distort the truth about what actually happens during incidents of excessive force. And we told you several examples where video footage later emerged that destroyed the original police narrative.

Well, that video footage is what we’re going to focus on next.

Archival:

Keep fighting you’re going to get it again. You want it again? Shut your mouth. I’m done [inaudible 00:01:45] around with you.

Sara Ganim:

Some of the most egregious police misconduct that we know of, we know of it because of the video evidence. Sometimes that’s a cell phone video, a dash cam video, and more recently, body camera video.

Archival:

Hands on your back. Hands on your back or you get tased. Roll over on your stomach. On your stomach, on your stomach, on your stomach.

Sara Ganim:

Take Jordan Edwards in Dallas, Texas, as an example.

Archival:

We just watched our friend die in front of us.

Sara Ganim:

In April of 2017, the 15 year old was shot and killed by a police officer who claimed that Edwards was inside a car that was moving aggressively toward officers. But the next day, when the police chief reviewed the body camera footage, he saw that the opposite was true. The car was moving away when shots were fatally fired into it.

The officer who pulled the trigger was fired and months later he was convicted of murder, a rare conviction of a police officer. As the Texas Tribune wrote after the verdict, the body camera footage changed everything from the beginning. And that’s why discussions about police reform always seem to include discussions about body cameras.

But for the video evidence to hold people to account, it has to be publicly accessible. So what happens when the average person tries to get a hold of body camera footage?

This is Why Don’t We Know, the podcast about data deserts and missing information and the real life consequences of government secrecy.

I’m Sara Ganim and in this episode we’re exploring body cameras.

Archival:

Hands up, don’t shoot. Hands up, don’t shoot.

Sara Ganim:

In the summer of 2020, protests were erupting across the country in response to the murder of George Floyd.

Archival:

George Floyd.

Sara Ganim:

And during those protests there were confrontations with police. Our team at Why Don’t We Know wanted to run a little experiment.

We wanted to see how difficult it is for the average citizen to reasonably get their hands on body camera footage using Freedom of Information Requests, sometimes also known as Public Records Requests. If you’re a listener of this podcast, then you already know this, but public records requests are the foundation of a lot of our reporting here. So we knew we needed to be specific, because to be successful with the public records request, one of the first rules is that you need to have a narrow request.

You’ll get a very quick denial if you just broadly ask for a bunch of stuff, like all of the body camera footage from a big protest. But we also wanted to be realistic. We thought about the kind of scenario someone might be in, a real person needing to get footage of an event that they were involved in.

Let’s say for example, you were a protestor in the summer of 2020 after George Floyd’s death. And while you were protesting, you were shot with tear gas. You want to see the body camera footage, but you probably are not going to know the name of the police officer who sprayed you. The best that you could probably hope for is that you remember the street corner that you were standing on. So we tried this in five different cities of varying sizes.

Reporter Kristin Moorehead searched newspaper reports from that summer and found documented incidents where police clashed with protestors in the streets. She got the location of the clashes from the news reports and then requested the body camera footage of those incidents from police.

She went to departments in Scottsdale, Arizona, Des Moines, Iowa, Omaha, Nebraska, Oakland, California, and from the NYPD.

Kristin Moorehead:

And I can tell you right off the bat, it is not easy.

Sara Ganim:

Tell me what happened. Why is it not easy?

Kristin Moorehead:

So, I guess we’ll go down the list. Omaha, they were very quick to respond to me, but they said they denied my FOIA request, stating that body camera footage was not a public record.

Sara Ganim:

She read me the email.

Kristin Moorehead:

Although the Nebraska Public Record statutes provide for access to public documents, such access is not absolute. The statutes also provide for exceptions to disclosure by express and special provisions. There are 21 categories of documents that may be kept confidential from the public at the discretion of the agency involved.

The supplemental reports video and photographic evidence to include body-worn camera footage, forensic reports and transcripts containing investigative information, these records are not considered public record under Nebraska State Statute, therefore your request for that material is denied.

Sara Ganim:

So basically they’re saying that, even though in many states body camera footage is available to the public through open records requests, in Nebraska this is one of those areas that they’ve exempt. You do not have the right to get body camera footage from police in Nebraska.

Kristin Moorehead:

Yes. For whatever reason, that body camera footage is still being used under investigative purposes. They might be either claiming or saying that they’re still using that footage for some investigation that would then be exempt from public record.

Sara Ganim:

Basically, in Nebraska body camera footage is considered an investigative record and therefore police don’t have to turn it over. Practically speaking, that means that if you were a protestor involved in a clash with police, you can’t get your own record of what happened to you because police are investigating it.

So what else did you find in other states?

Kristin Moorehead:

So Oakland, California, is still processing my request. They initially gave me a response deadline of December 10th, and then a couple days later they’re like, just kidding, we’ll have it to you by the 28th. So who’s to say if they’ll actually get back to me by the 28th or if they may just push it back even further? Who knows?

Sara Ganim:

Quick update. They kept pushing the response date to January, then March. Then finally, in late August, they got back to us but they denied our request.

Kristin Moorehead:

Des Moines, Iowa. When I was trying to make a FOIA request, they wanted to charge a fee upfront. So body camera footage costs $15 for the first 15 minutes you request, and then $10 for each additional 15 minutes.

Sara Ganim:

Okay, so you didn’t end up filing there. Where else?

Kristin Moorehead:

Scottsdale, Arizona, was also attempting to get money before you actually finished filing the FOIA request.

Sara Ganim:

And the New York Police Department, the NYPD, does not seem to categorize footage by location of the incident. When we asked for footage from a certain day in a certain street corner where we knew that there were clashes with protestors, we were told that they were, “Unable to locate records responsive to our request, based on the information that we provided.”

After this exercise. Do you feel that you can say that these kinds of records are easily accessible, not easily accessible, somewhere in the middle? Where would you come down on this?

Kristin Moorehead:

I would say, for the most part, it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Because if you’re thinking about it in terms of the average citizen, if for example, my friend was at that Black Lives Matter protest and I wanted to see how police treated that friend in Omaha, they would deny my request.

In Scottsdale, they would charge me money for it. The reason we have FOIA and public records is so that the public can easily access the things that the government and government entities are doing. And when these FOIA requests are so difficult and so tangled up in litigation and red tape, it makes it impossible for normal people to access this.

So it’s really interesting to see how different departments deal with a FOIA request for body camera footage, because I think every city I asked dealt with it differently.

Sara Ganim:

I’ve always known about the limitations of body-worn police cameras. Cameras get turned off, footage gets lost, but I hadn’t really considered that even when they do capture an incident, it might still be impossible to get.

Mary D. Fan:

Historically, it’s been a challenge to get law enforcement officers to record even a snippet of the investigative process.

Sara Ganim:

That’s Mary D. Fan. She’s a law professor at the University of Washington.

Mary D. Fan:

A lot of criminal investigation and interrogation is shrouded in secrecy and opaque.

Sara Ganim:

She wrote a book about the rise of police worn body cameras aptly called camera power.

Mary D. Fan:

You’re right. I mean body cameras are just another tool. They’re not a technological silver bullet to solve fierce disputes over the rights and wrongs of encounters.

Sara Ganim:

Fan told me that to really understand, we have to take a step back, a leap in time really, to 2014.

Even though body-worn police cameras had existed for several years, there was one particular case that really highlighted a widespread need for them.

Archival:

There is growing outrage tonight after an unarmed African American teenager was shot and killed by police in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri.

A really galvanizing moment was the encounter in Ferguson between Michael Brown and a police officer.

The state’s governor sent in the Missouri National Guard.

What led to the killing of Michael Brown was fiercely disputed.

Justice for Mike Brown! Justice for Mike Brown!

Sara Ganim:

18 year old Michael Brown was shot 12 times by a 28 year old police officer who said that Brown attacked him and tried to grab his gun. But a witness, and friend of Brown’s, told a very different story, saying that the officer initiated the confrontation by grabbing Brown by the neck.

The officer said Brown was charging at him when he fired the fatal shot. The witness said Brown had his arms up, raised in a surrender position.

Mary D. Fan:

And there was no camera. And that’s actually why there was an outcry for recordings, and it was an unusual convergence of groups that are not always on the same side of the table. But you have civil rights and civil liberties groups joining with police chiefs who are wrestling with protests that are rocking the streets of their cities.

And so, you have very unlikely bedfellows joining together to call for officers to start deploying body cameras. And the reason why is in Michael Brown’s case, there was no body camera, so we don’t know what happened. Witnesses told very divergent accounts, and so this just really showed the need for having some more evidence in these encounters.

Sara Ganim:

But as is often the case, the haste to implement the technology was quicker than the legislative process. The Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of Information wrote that police departments got body cameras before creating policies and procedures that would keep them in compliance with open records laws.

The report says that there are still 20 states that have no laws dealing with public accessibility to body-worn police camera footage. So bottom line, it’s all over the place. In some states, body camera footage isn’t even a public record.

Like in Washington, where the only people who can see the footage are those who are caught on camera, they’re lawyers and they recently updated this to include family members of anyone who was killed in Pennsylvania. You have to jump through a bunch of hoops like listing all the people involved in the incident, your relationship with the video, and then making the request in person or by certified mail.

Then there’s South Carolina where it is a public record. But unlike a paper document which the state is required to keep for five years, body camera footage can be destroyed within 14 days. So, you better be quick with that request. And while 14 days is on the low end of the spectrum, back in 2016, the Brennan Center found that many major cities only require police to keep footage for weeks or months, not years. As is more typical for paper documents,

Mary D. Fan:

Police departments are not IT shops. They’re just simply not set up to handle these vast volumes of data.

Sara Ganim:

In this regard, I’m actually pretty sympathetic to police departments. It’s not just about wearing the cameras. You have to have the servers large enough to store all of this footage. One department told us they have 4.6 million files of storage from the last five years.

Mary D. Fan:

This is difficult for particularly under-resourced or smaller communities, smaller departments.

Sara Ganim:

And then to hire someone to go through it every time there’s a request. That person has to watch all this footage to make sure that they’re getting the right stuff, and then redact anything that needs to be redacted. Compared to paper documents which are easily searchable, it’s a huge task.

Mary D. Fan:

Police see us in some of the worst moments of our lives. Some of the most sensitive, some of the most private. And with body cameras, now you have recordings of these very painful, very intimate, potentially traumatizing moments of people’s lives. Somebody may have to sit there manually, go through hours and hours just to redact a few moments. Going through hours and hours of footage and redacting is incredibly dull.

A lot of what you see on TV is not the hours and hours of body camera footage that actually gets recorded.

Sara Ganim:

Why Don’t We Know reached out to several police departments to talk about this.

Dan Adams:

My name is Sergeant Dan Adams and I am the department’s Public Information Officer.

Sarah Jensen:

My name’s Sarah Jensen and I am the Public Information Officer for the Norman Police Department in Norman, Oklahoma.

Patrick Michaud:

I am Detective Patrick Michaud with Seattle Police Department.

Sara Ganim:

We wanted to know, are police department’s now dedicating rooms full of giant servers with thousands of hours of footage on them? This is kind of how I pictured it, so we wanted to see if it was true.

And what we learned was that many of the companies that sell body cameras, they sell the video storage, too.

Dan Adams:

They provide not only the body cameras themselves, but then also the digital storage of the videos that are produced from the body cameras.

Sarah Jensen:

Our officers come in for shift and they check it out from a kiosk. And then from there, at the end of their shift, they place it back onto the kiosk, which automatically downloads it into our locally housed storage.

Patrick Michaud:

That’s the nice part about the system that we have, is that we don’t have to worry about the storage size.

Sara Ganim:

But the Police Executive Research Forum surveyed 1200 law enforcement agencies in 2018 and found that only about 30% of them are using those cloud-based storage options. 60% store their video in-house in an internal server, and the reason is that they find it to be cheaper.

Mary D. Fan:

The real money’s in the data storage, the data analytics, tools.

Sara Ganim:

That’s Mary Fan, again.

Mary D. Fan:

In fact, a lot of private companies will start out by, Hey, we’ll give you some body cameras, try out these body cameras, and then if the police departments deploy them, well then they can get the money with all the management of the data.

Sara Ganim:

Last year, the Washington Post reported that several small police departments ended their police body camera programs because of the cost of maintaining them. And it’s not just the servers that are costly.

Survey respondents said that officers spent an average of 25 and a half minutes every day reviewing and tagging video footage, and then 90 hours a month dealing with the records requests. Associate producer Thomas Holton asked police departments about this.

Dan Adams:

So, if a Freedom of Information Act request comes into the agency, it’ll be reviewed generally by the head of the records unit.

Sara Ganim:

That’s Dan Adams, the public Information Officer for the Grand Rapids Police Department.

Dan Adams:

We then have a video production technician, and that’s what his primary job is. He’s full-time to download and then redact videos, in order to abide by all state federal laws regarding privacy and criminal justice information systems and so on.

Thomas Holton:

So is the video production technician, did you have that as a position before you implemented body cameras back in 2015?

Dan Adams:

No, that position was created specifically for this reason.

Sara Ganim:

In Norman, Oklahoma. Public information officer Sarah Jensen told us…

Sarah Jensen:

We have a part-time redaction clerk who manages all of those requests for our agency.

Thomas Holton:

And did you have to create that job after the body cameras were implemented?

Sarah Jensen:

Yes.

Sara Ganim:

Still, even with someone dedicated full-time to this task, it can take months and months to get footage as our experiment last summer proved. Which brings me to the second part of our reporting.

In addition to trying to get actual footage, we also filed requests with the top 50 police departments in the country, asking them to see their fee schedules so that we could see how much police departments are charging people to identify and turn over body camera footage. Perhaps not that surprisingly, what we found is that it can cost a heck of a lot of money depending on what you’re asking for. Here’s the breakdown.

Most places charge between 15 and $40 per hour for video footage. Some like Austin, Texas, were a little lower, and some like Detroit were closer to $70 an hour. Only one police department, Louisville, Kentucky, told us that they don’t charge a fee, saying that they instead employ three video records specialists to review and redact all body camera and dash camera footage before it’s released to the public free of charge.

But at the other end of the spectrum, there is Las Vegas Police Department, by far the most expensive rate where they wanted $280 per hour for video plus $25 per DVD delivery. Just to put this into perspective, $280 an hour equals a salary of more than $582,000 a year, for a police officer working to redact a video. And I don’t think, I believe that the officer in charge of video collection is actually making $582,000 a year. So obviously, Las Vegas police are up-charging citizens for body camera footage.

These are such a frustrating aspect of open records. So frustrating that last season, I did nearly an entire episode on this alone. There are lots of schools of thought about fees for open records. But the bottom line is that if a record is public, then the fee to get it should be nominal, not a deal-breaker.

But agencies are creative about using money as a barrier, as an excuse not to turn things over. I’ll share just two examples. In Tampa, Florida, one law firm posted online about the frustration of having to pay hundreds of dollars in fees for redactions to blur the faces of officers that are seen on body camera footage that otherwise would be a public record. Another example is in Pennsylvania, where there’s a $120 fee to appeal a denial, giving virtually no incentive for police to hand something over to the public on the first try.

Just as an aside, we also asked the same 50 police departments for their wait times for body camera footage, how long people had to wait to get their request answered. But most departments didn’t have that information. I found this kind of surprising. You’d think that they would want to know how long the queue is, given the next thing I’m going to tell you, which is that about 25% of police departments had wait times so long that they had not responded to our requests for more than six months. Six months of waiting and no response.

The Police Executive Research Forum polled 1200 police agencies in 2018, asking them about policies regarding handing over body camera footage to the public. And the research team came back just as frustrated then as we are now, reporting that it was clear the information was not regularly maintained by many jurisdictions. And in cases where information was maintained, it was often not standardized, within a single jurisdiction across years, let alone between different jurisdictions.

These questions around storage, redaction, and sharing of body camera footage, they have a lot of consequences. We get it. Camera footage is not the same as a paper document. It’s harder to search, harder to redact, and harder to store. But because of that and the sometimes weak laws regarding retention of those records, in some states it’s possible that I can make a request for body camera footage and my request won’t get processed until after the retention period is over.

For example, in Milwaukee, the law says that the police are only required to keep video records for 120 days. And after that, they can destroy them to make room for more. But when we requested footage from them, we were told the backlog of requests for body camera footage was six months. So does that mean that by the time our number is called, this stuff will be gone?

Associate producer Thomas Holton asked Milwaukee Police Sergeant Doug Wiorek, this question.

Thomas Holton:

Is the footage saved or flagged so that it doesn’t accidentally get deleted before the request is carried out?

Doug Wiorek:

So, the way we set this up is, in my opinion, kind of unique and just because of what you’re talking about. State law says we have to keep it 120 days. What the Fire/Police Commission and the city attorneys decided is, well, we’re actually going to keep things for 130 days just in case that scenario that you mentioned happens.

Where somebody comes in on day 120 and says, “Look, I’m looking for these files,” we got about 10 more days to access them. So it hits that 130, that video is gone. However, the metadata that’s associated with that video remains. So we’re always able to see who created it, when it was created, the conditions which they were created, but the video itself is no longer there.

Sara Ganim:

Wiorek told us later in a follow-up conversation that flagging actually happens when the request is made and not when it’s fulfilled. And that greatly reduces the chances that video footage will be deleted while a public records request is in the queue. Warwick also told us that not all body camera footage is treated equally.

Some footage is only retained for 130 days if it’s deemed unimportant, but if an arrest is made or there’s a shooting involved, the video retention is automatically increased. Some video, he says, is kept indefinitely because it’s deemed serious. Other police departments that answered our calls said something similar. That systems are in place to tag videos based on what they contain and the tagging determines the retention period. But this is an expensive practice for the Milwaukee Police. Their current five-year contract is $8 million, and not every department can afford that kind of price tag.

According to the National Conference of State legislatures, only 14 states provide some kind of funding to offset the costs. So what that means is that there are scenarios out there where laws just don’t add up in favor of the people. Since retention times are often much, much shorter, it leaves two scenarios where footage is deleted long before interested parties know they actually need it.

Here’s an example of what I mean. In many states, if you are wronged in some way, you have a certain amount of time, it’s called the statute of limitations, to file a lawsuit.

Lauren Bonds:

It takes people a while when their civil rights are violated before they can actually find a lawyer that they want to use, get them hired, get them on board.

Sara Ganim:

Lauren Bonds is the legal director for the National Police Accountability Project, and she recalled times where attorneys were told…

Lauren Bonds:

They were unable to get this information, like body cam footage through civil discovery, because it had been deleted before they’d sent the preservation notice, which is the letter you send sometimes even before you file a lawsuit, putting a police department on notice that they shouldn’t destroy certain information because it’s going to be relevant in the lawsuit.

Sara Ganim:

That brings up a really good point because statute of limitations for civil litigation in most states is not less than two years, and there’s a reason for that. It’s because we as society have acknowledged that it takes people time to get an attorney and to get that attorney who’s busy with many, many other cases to file all the relevant paperwork and get their case moving forward, get the case started.

And so, that’s why people have two years before that ability for them to pursue that legal action expires. But that doesn’t translate over to saving documents, or in this case video footage.

Lauren Bonds:

Yeah, no, I think that’s absolutely the point, right? Even if your claim hasn’t expired before the footage has been deleted, that can severely undermine your ability to pursue your case effectively.

You’re losing really critical evidence and it takes it from a situation where you have something that’s documented and incredible to he said/he said or he said/she said situation.

Sara Ganim:

As you hear, there are so many different ways that all of this impacts the public. And to be fair, there are police departments out there who are trying to creatively address some of these issues, like Seattle PD for example. They told Thomas…

Patrick Michaud:

We were actually experimenting with getting that stuff up onto a YouTube channel for quite a while, where it was just auto redacting stuff and putting it up.

Sara Ganim:

You heard that right. During their pilot program back in 2017, they sponsored a tech competition to create an automated redaction system that would allow them to automatically post footage on YouTube.

On the surface, this seems like a win-win, right? The public gets immediate access and officers don’t have to spend time on the technical side. But as Mary Fan recalls…

Mary D. Fan:

What you got was blurry images, one reporter said, as if it was shot by a drunk ghost because it’s blurry, you can’t tell anything, it’s kind of useless at that point.

Patrick Michaud:

We tried. It was an experiment. It didn’t work. So we had to can that and just go with the standard public disclosure process that we already had in effect for our dash cam and as all of our other files.

Sara Ganim:

Fan told me that other police departments that tried posting certain footage online ran into the nasty world of internet trolls.

Mary D. Fan:

Some of that footage of people in the worst moments of their lives, talking about their kids, their families, showing their wounds after a domestic assault, for example, on camera, now gets posted on YouTube.

And as you know, YouTube as a commenting feature. And people would make the kind of comments, the trolling comments, that you often see in the comments section. And so, these are major dilemmas, how to protect against privacy harms as well.

Patrick Michaud:

And our goal is to be able to be as transparent as possible, while still providing public safety and not re-victimizing people who may happen to be having their worst day of their life. It’s a weird balance. It’s a tough balance. There’s a lot of questions that nobody’s ever asked that we’re running up against.

Like I said, this is just the beginning, so it’s going to be really interesting to see where technology takes us here in the next five, 10, 15 years.

Sara Ganim:

I want to stress something here. The police departments that are forthcoming about this information, the ones who will pick up the phone and talk about it, they seem to have good safeguards in place. But for every police officer you hear from in this episode, there were several more who never picked up the phone, answered our emails, or returned our voicemails. And we don’t know that those folks have the same attitude toward public access.

The fact that they won’t even answer questions about it, that tells me that they might not. Take New York City Police, for example. Not only are they not answering our requests, but in 2019, the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board, which investigates complaints about misconduct at the NYPD, wrote a letter about the difficulty of obtaining evidence from them, specifically noting body camera footage.

The letter outlines nearly 800 backlogged requests for body camera footage and says that there have been several instances where the NYPD denied the existence of camera footage only for the review board to later discover that it did, in fact, exist.

Attorney Gideon Oliver, who often finds himself using New York’s public records laws to try to get body camera footage, said the NYPD is so notorious about avoiding public records requests, he called the situation dire.

Gideon Oliver:

It’s incredibly hard to shake loose body-worn camera footage from the NYPD through FOIA requests.

Sara Ganim:

In fact, he’s experienced times where the NYPD claimed they cannot search and find footage based on certain criteria like our criteria. Like the location of an incident.

Gideon Oliver:

They’re very creative about the exemptions they apply and the redactions they make.

Sara Ganim:

If you want footage from the NYPD, your search criteria has to match their tagging criteria.

Gideon Oliver:

Even if you’ve identified the footage in a way that they say they can find, very frequently in response to a FOIA request, they’ll say, “Well, sure. You asked for all the body-worn camera footage from officers who are at this location and that time, but we don’t store or index the footage that way, so we can’t search for it or give it to you.”

Sara Ganim:

But here’s the thing. When you file a request with the NYPD, they don’t give you the opportunity to describe the situation that you’re requesting. And a quick skimming of the request that they’re getting, shows that they often deny body camera footage because they say they can’t find it. It’s a nearly impossible riddle to solve.

This is also frustrating, mostly because there’s no straightforward solution. We don’t want less footage to sift through. That would mean fewer incidents captured on tape. We also don’t want more police officers who should be on the streets instead sitting behind a computer screen sifting through footage trying to fulfill requests. The thing is…

Archival:

I’m going to be proposing some new community policing initiatives-

Sara Ganim:

Body cameras were supposed to kickstart the 21st century policing initiative.

Archival:

… Including up to 50,000 additional body-worn cameras for law enforcement agencies, and I look forward to working-

Sara Ganim:

After Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, President Obama proposed $263 million to match state funding and help pay for more than 50,000 cameras. He called it an antidote to the simmering distrust between police and community, saying, “Ferguson is a solvable problem, but there remains an infrastructure problem.”

As the Arnold Foundation pointed out in a recent report, these tools need to be standardized and organized at a federal level for initiatives like this to really work in a way that promotes transparency. Otherwise, in certain places as we found out, body-worn camera footage is basically just for the police, not for the public.

This, is Why Don’t We Know.

This episode was written and produced by me, Sara Ganim. The associate producer is Thomas Holton. Our research consultant is Britney Suszan. Additional research and reporting was done by Britney Miller, Kristen Moorehead, and Thomas Holton.

Open records requests were filed by Kristin Moorehead, Britney Suszan, Christopher Cann, and Tori Whidden. Archival sound was collected by Audrey Mostek and Thomas Holton. This episode was edited by Amy Fu and James Sullivan at WUFT in Gainesville, Florida.

The Why Don’t We Know theme music was composed by Pete Readman. Audio mixing was done by James Sullivan. Why Don’t We Know is a production of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida.

A special thanks to the Hearst Family Foundation for providing the grant money that supports this reporting. For more information, please visit our website at www.WhyDontWeKnow.org.

Transcript created by Rev.com