Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

New Hampshire Still Doesn’t Require Police Body Cameras. The House Shelved the Bill to Open the Footage.

Ten years into RSA 105-D, the cameras are optional, the footage is exempt by default, and the statute orders most of it destroyed by day 180. The bill that would have changed the second part died in February without a roll call.

New Hampshire wrote its police body camera law in 2016. The catch sits in the first sentence: the chapter applies only to agencies that choose to buy cameras. No department in this state has ever been required to record its officers at work. Not in 2016, not after the state built a grant fund in 2021 to pay for the equipment, and not now.

This winter, eight House Republicans went after the other half of the problem, the part that decides what you get to see. House Bill 1587 would have made body camera footage a public record under RSA 91-A, with mandatory redactions, a five-business-day response clock, and the repeal of the blanket exemption that has kept most recordings out of public hands for a decade. On February 6, the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee voted 12-0 to send it to interim study. On February 19, the full House confirmed the referral by voice vote on the consent calendar, without debate. In the second year of a two-year session, interim study is where a bill goes to die politely.

So the law stands as written. The cameras are optional. The footage is exempt unless it shows force, a fired gun, or a felony arrest. And the statute orders nearly everything else erased within 180 days.

A law that requires nothing

House Bill 1584 of 2016 gave New Hampshire RSA chapter 105-D, effective January 1, 2017. It reads like a careful operating manual. Officers must switch the camera on when they arrive at a call. They must tell people they are being recorded. They cannot record victim interviews without consent, cannot record on school grounds outside an emergency or a call for service, cannot run facial recognition or any other analytics on the files, and must store everything to FBI security standards by the end of each shift. After a shooting, a department may bar the officer involved from watching the video before writing a report.

Every one of those rules is conditional. RSA 105-D:2, I limits the entire chapter to an agency that elects to equip its officers. A department that never buys a camera never touches the statute. The New Hampshire Municipal Association said the quiet part in its comment on HB 1587’s fiscal note: state law does not require any officer to wear one, though many local departments and the State Police have adopted cameras on their own.

On the mandate question, that makes New Hampshire common, not an outlier. The National Conference of State Legislatures counts seven states that require body cameras statewide: Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Carolina. What sets New Hampshire apart is what happens to the footage after it exists.

A right to see almost nothing

The same 2016 act amended the Right-to-Know Law. RSA 91-A:5, X exempts every body camera recording from public disclosure by default. Three windows open the exemption: footage showing restraint or use of force by an officer, the discharge of a firearm, or an encounter that ends in a felony-level arrest. Then the statute closes each window partway. Even qualifying footage stays withheld to the extent disclosure would invade anyone’s privacy or trip another exemption.

Notice who applies that test. The agency holding the footage decides, in the first instance, whether its own officers’ conduct fits a disclosure window and how much redaction privacy demands. A requester who disagrees has one realistic remedy: a petition in superior court under RSA 91-A:7, on the requester’s own time and dime. I made the broader argument about that arrangement in The Right to Know Is Not a Favor. The body camera exemption is that arrangement at its purest.

The state has seen what the default produces. When Manchester officers shot Nickenley Turenne in December 2025, his family asked for months to see the body camera footage. They were shown it only after the attorney general closed the investigation, 207 days later, as Granite State Report detailed on July 19. In Gilford, a pending federal civil rights complaint alleges that officers amended their reports after the plaintiffs hired counsel, removing contradictions with what their own cameras had captured. Those are allegations the officers are entitled to contest. The point is narrower: the footage that could settle such disputes is exactly the class of record RSA 91-A:5, X leaves in the department’s hands.

The clock built into the law

Paragraph XVI of RSA 105-D:2 sets the schedule. Recordings shall be permanently destroyed “no sooner than 30 days and no longer than 180 days” from the date they were made. Destruction is the command, not the option. A recording escapes the shredder only by earning an exception: deadly force or deadly restraint, a firearm discharge, death or serious bodily injury, or an encounter that draws a complaint to the department within 30 days. Those must be kept at least three years, along with anything held as evidence in a case or an internal investigation. A court order or pending litigation extends retention only as long as the legal requirement lasts.

The life of a recording under RSA 105-D:2, XVI. Graphic by Granite State Report.

Read those triggers from a civilian’s chair. If something went wrong during your stop and you do not complain to the police about the police within a month, the recording can be erased on day 31 and must be gone by day 181. A Right-to-Know fight over withheld footage can take longer than that to reach a judge. By the time the dispute matures, the record it concerns may be legally gone.

The state will help you buy a camera it never makes you wear

Money stopped being the excuse in 2021. That year’s budget created the Body-Worn and Dashboard Camera Fund inside the Department of Safety, RSA 105-D:3, a matching grant program run jointly by the safety commissioner and the attorney general. It completed a recommendation of the LEACT commission Governor Sununu convened after the murder of George Floyd. Rules took effect January 28, 2022. Grants are capped at $50,000 per agency and cover up to half the cost of cameras, dash systems, and data storage.

The first round moved in June 2022: the Executive Council cleared $719,646 for 29 departments, with Amherst, Derry, Keene, Rochester, and Salem each taking the full $50,000. By September 2023, after four rounds, 46 departments had been awarded about $1.16 million, while $2.87 million sat in the fund unclaimed. The Department of Safety kept reopening the window, most recently with an application deadline of June 30, 2025. For scale, Massachusetts reports making roughly $13.9 million available for the same purpose since 2021. New Hampshire’s State Police got separate camera funding in 2021 after what NHPR described as years of budget impasses, and the Department of Corrections has put a camera on every sworn officer it employs.

So the pieces exist: a statute that says how to run cameras, a fund that pays for them, agencies that volunteered. What New Hampshire has refused to supply, session after session, is the requirement, and the public’s right to watch the results.

The bill, and the burial

HB 1587 was sponsored by eight Republicans: Rep. Sabourin dit Choiniere of Rockingham District 30, the prime sponsor, joined by Reps. Corcoran, Giasson, Tim Mannion, Tom Mannion, and Slottje of Hillsborough, Granger of Strafford, and Spillane of Rockingham. The bill text did five things. It rewrote the Right-to-Know definitions so body camera video counts as a governmental record. It declared that such footage “shall be subject to public disclosure under this chapter.” It required redaction of personal identifying information, imagery of minors and sexual assault victims, and private spaces before release. It set a five-business-day response clock and let agencies charge actual redaction costs. And it repealed RSA 91-A:5, X outright.

There is a symmetry worth noticing. HB 1584 built the exemption in 2016. HB 1587 tried to tear it out in 2026. Three bill numbers apart, one decade apart, pointed in opposite directions.

The bill never got a floor fight. The Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee, chaired by Rep. Terry Roy, the Deerfield Republican, recommended interim study 12-0 on February 6, and the recommendation rode the consent calendar through the full House on February 19 by voice vote. No roll call. No debate. No fingerprints. Interim study in year two of the biennium means the committee may hold work sessions this fall and file a report, and the bill itself is dead. Anything real starts over with a new bill in 2027.

The pattern is older than this bill. Senate Bill 289, a Republican measure on the use and preservation of recordings, went to interim study by Senate voice vote on January 7. House Bill 146, a 2025 camera bill, was killed outright in the Senate that May. And House Bill 253 of 2021, the Democratic bill that would have required every officer in the state to wear a camera, died in committee. Mandate bills die. Disclosure bills die. The chapter survives every session intact.

The part of the chapter that vanished

One provision did change recently, in the other direction. In 2021, lawmakers added RSA 105-D:2-a, a commission charged with designing a single, independent statewide body to take misconduct complaints against any officer, LEACT recommendation number 16. Its report came due November 1, 2021. Effective August 1, 2025, the section was repealed as expired housekeeping. The accountability commission is no longer in the body camera chapter. The destruction schedule still is.

What happens now

Interim study buys the committee a quiet autumn and buys the public nothing. If the study produces a serious recommendation, a 2027 bill could revive the disclosure fight; the sponsors have shown the votes exist to file one. Until then, every police recording in New Hampshire lives under the 2016 rules: made only if a department chose cameras, released only if the department agrees the exemption’s windows apply, and destroyed on a statutory timer that outruns most disputes.

The fund’s complete grant ledger — every award, every denial, the current balance — is a public record any person in this state can demand under RSA 91-A. No press pass required. The law New Hampshire wrote works exactly as designed. The design is the choice, and the House renewed it this winter without saying a word out loud.

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