Law Enforcement Video Redaction: Facit’s Complete Guide

Police forces and other related organisations hold vast amounts of potentially evidential footage. Once requested as evidence, it must meet a criminal justice standard. People who appear in the footage but are not part of the case cannot be identifiable, which places a great burden on those organisations.

In the UK, retailers, shopping centres, NHS trusts, private security firms and police forces hold evidential footage. Police forces and law enforcement agencies have been increasingly outsourcing functions to private security firms. And people who appear in the footage those firms hold are afforded the same privacy as if the authorities held it.

In the US, police departments, sheriff's offices, courts, county governments and school districts hold footage, and so do homeowners whose doorbell footage police can ask for. And, when footage changes hands, the job of redacting it falls to the new holder, as Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court found when it took over its security cameras from the Sheriff's office.

This guide helps you understand whether your current approach to video redaction—by hand or using whatever your camera or evidence system includes—will hold up when footage is disclosed, and what to look for if it does not.

#Where footage comes from, and who asks for it

Footage may come from a wide range of sources—CCTV, in-car and dashcams, interview recordings, drones, doorbells or phones—and all of it may need redacting before public release or court submission. Camera footage includes faces and licence plates, but also personal data, documents in the frame, and audio (including names, phone numbers and other sensitive disclosures).

In the US, about 62% of local police departments had video cameras in patrol cars in 2020, the same share as used body-worn cameras; 43% used fixed surveillance cameras in public areas, and 12% used cameras on drones, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

In the UK, requests come from the defence, the courts and individuals—the law enables people to ask for footage themselves, without involving a lawyer or other legal process. While in the US, the public and the media request footage under state public records laws, which vary widely—in North Carolina, for example, police recordings are not public records, and a copy can only be released under a court order. Prosecutors also disclose footage to the defence in discovery.

Police forces are under increasing public scrutiny. For example, news outlets have reported failures to switch on body-worn cameras during flashpoints. Our article on when an officer's camera is switched on, and what that decision commits you to covers applications across policing, healthcare, transport and retail.

If your cameras record in the UK, Facit sets out what UK law and ICO guidance require of a body-worn camera scheme, including consent and covert recording. For the legal obligations themselves, read Facit's legal compliance guide for video footage—its section on US and international legal frameworks covers the US.

#Redacting footage so that it stands up as evidence

If you disclose footage in public or in court without redaction, you risk breaching data protection laws and losing public trust. Even with redaction, you are open to being challenged to show what was removed and who removed it.

Building a defensible process starts with the original footage. It must stay intact, and a redacted version is a separate entity that, once exported, cannot be reversed. The original should be clearly dated and timed and stored so it cannot be tampered with, and the audit trail should show what changed, when and by whom. It matters because a court can consider whether video is complete, edited or an excerpt.

Members of the public and journalists can see video shown in court because, in the UK, criminal courts sit in public. So what has to be redacted before video is shown in court may even extend to identity cards, financial records, healthcare records, and identifying marks such as tattoos.

A 2016 primer for US prosecutors, supported by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, notes that "it is becoming unusual to see a court case that does not include video evidence". It tells prosecutors to review files for privacy and witness-safety redactions, and to provide "a copy of the redacted video files to defense counsel".

In US states that have adopted Marsy's Law, a victim's identity may have to be protected before footage is released to the media or "in response to a public records request". In November 2025, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that police officers fired on in the line of duty are crime victims under Ohio's Marsy's Law, so their identities can be redacted from body-worn and dash-cam footage.

In the UK, you have a legal obligation to protect third parties. In practice, that means blurring the faces of everyone who is not the subject of the request. You must also blur every person in every frame they appear in order to protect bystanders, victims and witnesses—everyone at risk of retaliation, as well as undercover officers and informants.

In the US, it depends on the state. Illinois, for example, requires any body-worn camera recording released under its Freedom of Information Act to be redacted to remove anyone who is not the officer, a subject of the encounter, or directly involved in it.

Lighting and camera angles change as the wearer moves, and people overlap in frame, which is why bodycam footage is hard to redact. For how your choice of camera affects redaction later, read Facit's guide to privacy technology for video footage.

It can be lengthy and expensive to prepare video for court proceedings. Manual redaction can be error-prone, and automated redaction is faster—but it still needs human review because it can miss things when footage is difficult, not to mention the risk of redacting something that should have remained visible. In Phoenix, Arizona, the city has said that manually redacting one hour of video can take staff up to four hours.

#Identity Cloak provides redacted evidence

Unlike many redaction solutions, Facit's video redaction software, Identity Cloak, protects the source while it's working on it. It produces a separate redacted export file with an audit trail. That means that if the redaction is challenged, you still have the original to show what was removed.

Identity Cloak detects and tracks faces, bodies and licence plates throughout the entire video, including crowded and low-quality footage. You are free to adjust the blur by hand, use full-screen blur for sensitive scenes and silence sections of audio. You can even manually redact documents, screens and signage during the same session. And with layered blurring, signage and screens in the background stay blurred while a person of interest walking through that area remains visible.

Altogether, Identity Cloak is designed to make your work faster, easier and more accurate, while you retain the judgement about what to disclose.

#Redacting at volume, across forces and systems

Of course, police forces and law enforcement agencies already know their obligations, but meeting them at every request, to a consistent standard, across mixed camera estates and evidence systems is still a challenge.

For police forces, the sheer volume of footage and requests is a challenge. But it isn't just police organisations. In New York, the City Comptroller found in 2025 that the NYPD took 133 business days on average to grant or deny requests for body-worn camera footage, and failed to respond within 25 business days to 85% of them.

Many forces in the UK still redact by hand. What's more, they use separate systems. With no unified evidence management platform across the country, and many services relying on legacy or locally built tools that do not connect to national databases, cooperation between forces is often difficult.

The problems are also highlighted when redacted footage has to move between organisations, to legal counsel, expert witnesses and other agencies. Our article on how fragmented redaction practice is across UK forces makes the case for a standardised approach to digital evidence.

#Identity Cloak—automated video redaction for law enforcement

Available as a desktop application or a Milestone XProtect plugin, Identity Cloak offers a solution for forces and agencies that already use XProtect. Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court, for example, redacts footage from its security cameras inside XProtect with Facit's plug-in.

The desktop application processes any video format that VLC can play, including proprietary bodycam formats, through its built-in screen recorder. In practice, this means you don't need to replace cameras or change how you capture footage.

If you run Axis body-worn cameras into XProtect, Facit has a worked example of redacting body-worn video inside Milestone XProtect, including live streaming with redaction.

Keeping redaction in-house gives you far better control over footage and how it is handled. Most importantly, you control the timeline, access and audit trail. Automated tracking also reduces time spent on each clip, creating opportunities to clear backlogs built up under manual redaction.

If you need help choosing a tool, our guide to bodycam video redaction for police covers four essential factors, including how to set up a defensible workflow.

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