OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) â?? The police shootings of unarmed black men in Tulsa and Ferguson, Missouri, played a role in this year's changes to Oklahoma's Open Records Law regarding the public's access to police videos.
The Legislature had amended the law in 2014 to give the public access to videos from dashboard cameras, with certain exceptions.
State Senator David Holt authored the bill. He acknowledged the initial version wasn't crafted with body cameras in mind, but that changed when police shootings in Tulsa and Ferguson highlighted the need for more police body cameras in the field.
While some law enforcement officials and prosecutors wanted to scrap the changes altogether, Holt worked on a compromise hailed as a fair and possibly a model for other states.