Nevada Police Body Camera Laws: Access & Retention

Nevada requires designated law enforcement agencies to equip officers who routinely interact with the public with body cameras, and the Nevada Supreme Court has held the resulting footage is presumptively a public record under Nev. Rev. Stat. § 289.830, though an officer's face may be redacted.

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

Jurisdiction scope: This article addresses Nevada state law governing police body-worn cameras: the equipment and activation mandate, retention floor, and public-records access rules under Nev. Rev. Stat. § 289.830, as verified in July 2026. It does not address a civilian's right to record law enforcement, a separate and well-established question addressed elsewhere on this site.

Does Nevada require police to wear body cameras?

Yes, for the agencies and officers the statute names. Nev. Rev. Stat. § 289.830 requires a county sheriff's office, a metropolitan police department, an incorporated city's police department, a city or town marshal's department, the Nevada Highway Patrol, and school district police departments to require uniformed peace officers who routinely interact with the public to wear a portable event recording device while on duty, according to the official Nevada Revised Statutes. The statute was added to the NRS in 2015 and amended in 2017 and 2019; earlier versions of the law only permitted agencies to require cameras, and later amendments made the requirement mandatory for the covered agencies. Officers working in plain clothes and agencies not listed in the statute fall outside the mandate, so coverage is broad but not universal across every Nevada law enforcement function.

When must a Nevada officer's camera be recording?

The statute sets specific activation and deactivation rules rather than leaving the decision to an officer's discretion. A covered officer must activate the recording device at the initiation of a call for service or any other law enforcement or investigative encounter with a member of the public, and generally may not deactivate it until the encounter concludes. Nevada builds in a small number of privacy-driven exceptions: an officer may pause recording to protect the privacy of a person inside a private residence who asks for it, an individual reporting a crime anonymously, or a crime victim, according to the official Nevada Revised Statutes. Outside those narrow situations, deactivating the camera before an encounter ends is not a permitted use of officer discretion under the statute.

How long does Nevada require agencies to keep bodycam footage?

Agencies covered by § 289.830 must retain recorded video for not less than 15 days. That is a floor, not a ceiling: an agency's own retention schedule or policy can require longer storage, and footage tied to a pending prosecution, civil case, or internal-affairs investigation is typically kept well beyond the statutory minimum as a matter of ordinary evidence-preservation practice, even though the statute itself does not spell out an extended-retention trigger the way some other states' bodycam laws do.

Is Nevada bodycam footage a public record?

Yes, presumptively. The Nevada Supreme Court confirmed this directly in Conrad v. Reno Police Dep't, No. 84389 (Nev. June 15, 2023), holding that body-worn camera footage "is subject to both the [Nevada Public Records Act] and any confidentiality provisions limiting public disclosure," according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press's Nevada guide. That second half of the holding matters just as much as the first: the same decision upheld a police department's redaction of officers' faces from released footage, reasoning that an officer's face as it appears on camera functions like a personnel photograph, which Nev. Rev. Stat. § 289.025(1) makes confidential along with an officer's home address. Requests are also structured narrowly by statute: § 289.830 requires that requests for a recorded record be made on a per-incident basis rather than as a broad, ongoing request, and if a specific recording contains confidential material that cannot otherwise be redacted, the agency may limit the requester to viewing it in person at the location where the record is held instead of providing a copy.

A real example: the Henderson road-rage shooting

On November 21, 2025, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department released roughly an hour of body camera footage, split across five separate videos, through its Public Records Unit YouTube channel, covering the fatal shooting of 11-year-old Brandon Dominguez-Chavarria during a road-rage confrontation on the 215 Beltway near Gibson Road in Henderson, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The footage showed the suspect surrendering to the first responding officer and captured the reaction of the driver whose stepson had been killed. The release illustrates how Nevada's presumptively-public framework operates in practice: rather than requiring a lawsuit to force disclosure, LVMPD's own records unit routinely posts footage from high-profile incidents once the per-incident request and redaction process under § 289.830 has run its course.

Is it legal to record the police in Nevada?

That is a separate question from what this page addresses. Nevada is generally a one-party consent state for recording conversations, and a bystander has a well-established right to record an on-duty officer performing public duties in a public place. For a full explanation of that right, and how it differs from the bodycam rules discussed here, see Is It Illegal to Record Someone? and our Nevada recording laws guide.

Disclaimer

This article provides general legal information about Nevada law governing police body cameras and public access to footage, as verified in July 2026. It does not constitute legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Readers should consult a lawyer licensed in Nevada for advice about a specific records request or incident.

Related articles

• Police Bodycam Laws by State: the complete hub
• Is It Illegal to Record Someone in Public?
• Nevada Recording Laws: One-Party Consent Rules

Last updated: 2026-07-08. Statutes cited reflect their in-force version as of 2026-07-08.

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