Arkansas Police Body Camera Laws: Public Records Access

Arkansas has no statewide law requiring police departments to use body cameras, and no bodycam-specific access statute. Requests for footage run through the general Arkansas Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Ark. Code Ann. § 25-19-105, with one narrow exception for recordings depicting an officer's death.

This guide is part of our Police Bodycam Laws by State series.

Jurisdiction scope: This article addresses Arkansas state law on police body-worn cameras: the absence of a statewide mandate, public-records access under the Arkansas FOIA, and the one camera-specific confidentiality statute on the books. It does not address individual department policies, which vary by city and county, or a civilian's right to record police, which is covered separately in our guide to recording laws.

Does Arkansas require police departments to use body cameras?

No. Arkansas has no statute requiring any law enforcement agency, state or local, to purchase or deploy body-worn cameras. Whether the Arkansas State Police, a county sheriff's office, or a city police department uses cameras, and what its activation policy says, is a decision made by that agency alone. The closest Arkansas has come to a statewide mandate was House Bill 1219, filed in January 2025, which would have required every law enforcement agency and public entity employing officers to provide body-worn cameras and record all official interactions with the public by December 31, 2026. Representative Scott Richardson withdrew the bill on February 6, 2025, before it reached a committee vote, according to the Arkansas State Legislature's bill tracker. Arkansas is not among the handful of states (Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Carolina) that require statewide bodycam use. Many individual Arkansas departments have equipped officers with cameras on their own initiative, but coverage and activation rules differ from one jurisdiction to the next.

How the Arkansas FOIA treats bodycam footage

Arkansas's Freedom of Information Act starts from a presumption of openness. Ark. Code Ann. § 25-19-105(a)(1)(A) makes "all public records" open to inspection and copying, and copying "through image capture, including still and moving photography and video and digital recording" is expressly permitted once a record is available, according to the Arkansas General Assembly's code. Body camera and dashcam video qualify as records because they document law enforcement's performance of an official function. In practice, though, most footage tied to an arrest, a use-of-force incident, or any other active matter is withheld under § 25-19-105(b)(6), which exempts "undisclosed investigations by law enforcement agencies of suspected criminal activity." That exemption applies only while the investigation is open; once a case is closed, the same footage generally becomes available on request, subject to redaction for exempt material such as the identity of an undercover officer or a confidential informant. Agencies may also charge a reasonable per-copy fee for producing the video.

The one Arkansas statute written specifically for camera footage

Arkansas does have a single camera-specific statute, but it addresses a narrow situation: the death of a law enforcement officer. Ark. Code Ann. § 12-6-701 defines "record" to include "a photograph, video recording, or audio recording, including any audio or video footage captured on a body-worn camera or a dashboard camera," and then declares that a record depicting or recording the death of a law enforcement officer is confidential and exempt from FOIA disclosure, according to the Arkansas General Assembly's code. Automatic access, without a court petition, is limited to a defined set of people: a family member of the deceased officer (including a minor child of at least 14 with a parent's written consent and supervision), the employing agency or another agency conducting the official death investigation, the Division of Arkansas State Police, the FBI, prosecuting attorneys and their staff, and defense counsel or civil litigation attorneys through the discovery process. Access is not limited to that list, though: the statute separately lets any other person or entity petition the circuit court in the county where the record is located for access on a showing of good cause, weighing factors such as the public's interest in evaluating the officer's conduct, whether a compelling public interest favors disclosure, the severity of any privacy intrusion, and whether the information is available elsewhere. Outside of this specific scenario, Arkansas has no statute that singles out bodycam footage for special confidentiality or special openness; general FOIA law governs everything else.

How long does Arkansas keep bodycam footage?

Arkansas has no statewide law setting a minimum or maximum retention period for body camera or dashcam recordings. Retention is set entirely by each agency's own records-management policy. The leading case on this point is Daugherty v. Jacksonville Police Department, 2012 Ark. 264, in which the Arkansas Supreme Court considered a FOIA requester's claim that a department improperly destroyed dashcam footage of her traffic stop. According to the Arkansas Attorney General's 2025 FOIA Handbook, the court held that destroying the recording after 45 days, under the department's normal retention schedule, did not violate the FOIA, because the statute itself imposes no minimum retention requirement for public records. That means an Arkansas agency can lawfully destroy footage on whatever schedule its own policy sets, so long as it is not doing so specifically to evade a pending records request or ongoing litigation, which can separately implicate spoliation-of-evidence rules.

Watch out: If you want Arkansas bodycam footage preserved, don't wait. Because there is no statewide minimum retention period, some agencies' internal schedules run as short as 30 to 90 days. Submit a written FOIA request, or ask the agency in writing to preserve the specific recording, as soon as possible after an incident.

Officer accountability: activation and tampering

Because Arkansas has no statewide bodycam statute, it also has no state law addressing what happens when an officer fails to turn on a camera or tampers with footage. That stands in contrast to states like Colorado, which impose mandatory discipline and evidentiary consequences for a failure to activate. In Arkansas, activation requirements and the consequences for violating them are set by each department's use-of-force and equipment policies, enforced through internal affairs and ordinary personnel discipline rather than a statute. A pattern of destroyed or missing footage can still be raised in civil litigation or a criminal case through general spoliation-of-evidence doctrine, as the requester attempted (with partial success on a separate fee issue) in the Daugherty case, but Arkansas law does not create a bodycam-specific presumption against an officer the way some other states do.

Is a civilian allowed to record the police in Arkansas?

Arkansas is a one-party consent state for recording conversations, so a bystander generally does not need an officer's permission to record an encounter in public. This is a separate legal question from what this page covers. For a full explanation of the right to record law enforcement, see Is It Illegal to Record Someone?

More Arkansas Laws

• Arkansas Data Privacy Laws
• Arkansas Drone Laws
• Arkansas Recording Laws