A lawyer for Breonna Taylor’s family is once again asking the court to intervene in a request for information related to body camera footage from the night she was killed.
The original lawsuit, filed in early July, asked the court to compel LMPD to release the “audit trails” of any body cam footage from the search on March 13, 2020. The lawsuit said the audit trails would reveal “the time of the footage recordings, the user, the device name, the device ID, the serial number, the identity of those accessing the footage” and other information. By failing to provide the documents in a timely manner, lawyers argued the police department was out of compliance with the state's Open Records Act.
The amended complaint, filed July 9, says that Louisville Metro Police Department responded to the original request but the information provided is “deliberately deceptive.”
Attorney Sam Aguiar said that LMPD provided “user audit trails” a day after he initially filed suit against the agency for not complying with an open records request.
Aguiar argues that the user audit trails were not what his office requested and do not provide any indication of whether officers activated their body cams during the deadly, middle-of-the-night raid on Taylor’s apartment. Instead, Aguiar argues, the user audit trails only show if an officer logged into the video database and performed certain actions such as “viewing, tagging, renaming and restricting” certain recordings.
“In producing User Audit Trails, rather than Device Audit Trails and Evidence Audit Trails, Metro deliberately engaged in obstruction and deception,” he argued in the amended complaint. “Metro knew … that User Audit Trails do not reflect the uploads of body camera videos or identify from whose camera videos were obtained.”
Aguiar claims that body cams issued by LMPD automatically record under certain circumstances, and “device audit trails” and “evidence audit trails” would show if any cameras were activated on the night of the raid. He is asking the court to compel LMPD to release those records.
Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer and LMPD officials have both said previously that there is no body cam footage of the raid.
Clarification: A previous version of this story stated that officials claimed there is no body camera footage from that night. A representative from Mayor Fischer's office says while there is no footage from the raid itself, there is body camera footage from other officers responding to the scene after the fact.
