KVIG Informative

Nevada law says government agencies can only charge what it actually costs to produce a public record. The ACLU says Las Vegas police have been charging whatever they want — and getting away with it.

The ACLU of Nevada sued the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department this month, accusing the department of imposing excessive fees on people requesting public records, including police bodycam footage, in violation of the Nevada Public Records Act.

The lawsuit was filed in state court on behalf of the ACLU itself, a Nevada law firm, and news organizations — each of which the ACLU says encountered different fees and barriers trying to obtain the same category of public records from LVMPD.

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Jennifer Peter, editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project, one of the organizations joining the suit, said the case is fundamentally about government transparency. She said overcharging for records makes it harder to hold government agencies accountable, and that her organization joined the case both to secure reasonable access for its own reporters and to protect that access for anyone in the public trying to obtain records they’re legally entitled to.

The Nevada Public Records Act generally limits agencies to charging the actual cost of producing a record — not a fee designed to discourage requests in the first place. The ACLU argues LVMPD’s fee practices cross that line, particularly for bodycam footage, which has become an increasingly central piece of evidence in police accountability cases statewide.

This isn’t the ACLU of Nevada’s first records-access fight with LVMPD. The organization is also pursuing a separate case against the department over its 287(g) agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which it has appealed to the Nevada Supreme Court after a lower court dismissed the case on procedural grounds.

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The ACLU of Nevada has operated as a nonprofit, nonpartisan civil rights organization in the state since 1966, and describes public records access as a core part of its broader mission to hold Nevada government agencies accountable to the people they serve.

Every fee LVMPD charges for a records request is a small tax on the public’s ability to check the department’s own work. The ACLU’s lawsuit argues that tax has gotten too steep — and that Metro has been setting the price without anyone checking its math.