KVIG Informative

LVMPD started requiring new officers to wear body cameras in 2013, two years before Nevada’s Legislature gave agencies the authority to do it and four years before lawmakers made it mandatory statewide. Thirteen years later, the fight isn’t over whether officers wear the cameras. It’s over what the public has to pay to watch what they recorded.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department began requiring body-worn cameras for officers hired on or after July 1, 2013, according to the department’s own body-worn camera policy, which authorizes only the Taser Axon Flex camera system for official use. Officers hired before that date could wear one voluntarily, the policy states. The requirement predated any Nevada law authorizing or requiring the practice.

Nevada’s Legislature first added a body-camera statute to the Nevada Revised Statutes in 2015, according to the codified text of NRS 289.830. That original version let law enforcement agencies decide for themselves whether to require officers to wear the devices.

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Lawmakers rewrote the statute in 2017, changing its language from permissive to mandatory, according to the current text of NRS 289.830. The amended law requires county sheriff’s offices, metropolitan police departments, city police departments, municipal marshals and the Nevada Highway Patrol to adopt policies requiring officers to activate their cameras whenever they respond to a call for service or begin any other law enforcement or investigative encounter, and to keep recording until the encounter ends. A further amendment in 2019 extended the requirement to county school district police officers, according to the statute’s own history notes.

The law sets a floor of 15 days for how long agencies must retain footage and bars agencies from recording inside private residences, from identifying people who report crimes anonymously, and from identifying crime victims who ask to remain unnamed, according to NRS 289.830. It also directs agencies to discipline officers who fail to activate their cameras properly, manipulate footage or erase recordings ahead of the required retention period. The recordings are public records under the statute, but the law limits requests to a per-incident basis and allows agencies to require in-person inspection of footage that contains confidential information.

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That access provision is now the subject of a lawsuit against LVMPD. The ACLU of Nevada filed suit against the department on July 30, 2026, in the Eighth Judicial District Court, according to the organization’s own case record, alleging LVMPD is violating the Nevada Public Records Act by imposing excessive fees on people who request public records, including body-camera footage. Edgar Flores Law, The Marshall Project and The Nevada Independent joined the ACLU as co-plaintiffs, according to the same case record. The case is assigned to Judge Jerry Wiese under case number A-26-952733-W.

Nevada spent four years, from LVMPD’s 2013 policy to the Legislature’s 2017 mandate, settling the question of whether officers had to record their encounters with the public. It has not settled the question of what the public has to pay to see what got recorded. That fight is now in front of a judge.