Columbus police officer under internal investigation for bypassing Public Records

The Columbus Police Body Camera channel on YouTube is accompanied by a series of disclaimers informing would-be viewers that the channel is not run by the Columbus Division of Police or the City of Columbus, and that the videos included on the page “have been obtained through Public Records Requests.”

On at least two occasions, however, Columbus police officer Spencer Badger, who owns and operates the Columbus Police Body Camera channel, allegedly bypassed the CPD Public Records Unit to access and download body camera footage, a violation of CPD policy that triggered an ongoing administrative investigation, according to records obtained by Matter News. 

In addition, on “seven or eight” other occasions, Badger allegedly accessed footage from Axon, the network on which Columbus police body camera files are stored, and downloaded videos to a personal device in infringement of division policy, according to audio interviews conducted with Badger by investigators from the Columbus Police Internal Affairs Bureau and obtained by Matter News. Badger, who was relieved of his post on May 5, is currently serving desk duty pending the results of the investigation. (Badger did not respond to a list of emailed questions sent to an address associated with his Columbus Police Body Camera YouTube channel.)

One of the videos obtained absent a public records request by Badger shows a woman writhing on the ground, with an accompanying report describing her as in the midst of an accidental drug overdose. Her hands and face are covered in dirt, and in posting the footage to his YouTube channel, Badger tagged it with the headline “Officers find a woman eating mud.” 

“Clearly, he’s not thinking about the citizen when he’s posting this [footage]. He’s not thinking about their emotional state, or the impact [sharing the video will have] on their personal or professional life,” said Dr. Chenelle Jones, the assistant dean of community engagement and chair of public safety programs at Franklin University and a member of the city’s Civilian Police Review Board. “He’s probably thinking about how many views and likes he’s going to get. … He’s not thinking about the long-term effects of these videos, which are usually capturing people on their worst days, and usually in some interaction with law enforcement, which adds a whole other layer. And then he really only provides a short clip, along with his commentary. He doesn’t show what led up to the situation or give any perspective from the person involved. And that’s problematic, because we’re forming a narrative from a very skewed, very one-sided view of the incident.”

While Badger initially submitted a request for the body camera footage of the woman in crisis to the Public Records Unit in June 2023, he included the wrong incident number with his ask, which yielded no results. Rather than submitting a second request with the correct incident number, Badger bypassed Public Records and downloaded the footage to a personal device on Feb. 28, which he later uploaded to YouTube. In an interview conducted with Internal Affairs on Sept. 10, Badger told investigators he did so because he “knew that the video was a public record, that it would have been approved for distribution [and] there was nothing on it that would have been redacted.” Plus, he added, “I didn’t want to make the Public Records Unit do the same work twice.”

The second incident in which Badger bypassed Public Records involved a snippet of body camera footage included in a video headlined “Were these guys stopped for no reason?” Badger again told Internal Affairs investigators that he “thought [he] was doing Records a favor” by not making the request through official channels, and that he only planned to use a few seconds from the downloaded footage.

Attorney David Thomas, a partner at Taft, said cases such as this in which public employees have been accused of misusing state resources are relatively common, with offenders typically prosecuted for theft in office, “because they’re using government resources for non-government purposes,” or for unauthorized use of property, which can involve a person accessing employer computer systems absent approval.

There are other legal questions that could arise in bypassing Public Records, a unit whose employees are tasked with making sure that any footage released has been properly redacted. (A public information officer with CPD did not reply to multiple calls and emails requesting more information about the role of the Public Records Unit and the reasons a statute exists that bars officers from downloading body camera footage outside of established channels.)

Ohio, in particular, has relatively strong legal protections in place that “help thread the needle” between the public’s right to know and providing safeguards for individuals, according to Gary Daniels of the ACLU of Ohio. “You can’t show a dead body, a person being sexually assaulted, or someone who has just been sexually assaulted,” said Daniels, who could not comment specifically on Badger but spoke more broadly about the organization’s approach to similar cases. “In ACLU world, the way we approach these things is that public records are meant to keep an eye on the government. Public records are not meant to spy on or keep an eye on each other.”

Attorney Ed Forman of Marshall, Forman & Schlein said that not every piece of body camera footage qualifies as public record, noting exemptions made for footage that divulges medical information or other potentially sensitive personal data. “Among other things, there is an exemption for the depiction of a victim of an offense the release of which would be, to a reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities, an offensive and objectionable intrusion into the victim’s expectation of bodily privacy and integrity,” Forman wrote in an email. “I don’t know if what happened in this video was caused by a crime or a medical issue. … By circumventing the public records process, a person is substituting [their] judgment for that of the public agency as to what is subject to release. It is not their call to make. Worse, it would be a conflict of interest if the person making the decision stands to profit from deeming the records public, either through monetization or just for fame.” (There are currently more than 314,000 people subscribed to Badger’s Columbus Police Body Camera channel.)

Badger is no stranger to this type of public scrutiny. Public complaints have previously been lodged against his Columbus Police Body Camera channel, leading the officer to record and release a nine-minute video headlined “We Need to Talk,” in which he defended his approach to posting. “When I set out to create this channel, I wanted to show people what police officers are like 99 percent of the time that they’re doing their job,” he says. “I’ve seen a lot of stuff in the comments lately about how I’m exploiting these poor families [and] … trying to get attention and fame for myself, which is not what I’m doing.”

Badger has also drawn negative public attention for other social media channels he operates, including the YouTube Channel Thoughts of a Patrol Officer, in which he opines on various police-related issues, and a related Instagram page, the contents of which inspired the TikTok influencer Danesh (@thatdaneshguy) to create a video in October 2022 compiling posts made by Badger in which the officer shared arguably racist, queerphobic and transphobic memes. 

Currently, the pinned image on the Thoughts of a Patrol Officer Instagram page, posted four days after Badger was relieved of duty in May, includes a quote lifted from the Bible. “But the Lord is with me like a mighty warrior; so my persecutors will stumble and not prevail,” the passage reads. “They will fail and be thoroughly disgraced; their dishonor will never be forgotten.”

In recent years, online posts made by police officers have been subject to greater scrutiny, with researchers from the Plain View Project examining the social media accounts of about 2,900 officers from eight departments across the country, plus an additional 600 or so retired officers from the same departments, building out a database “replete with racist imagery and memes.” 

Badger, for his part, unpacked some of his views related to these issues in a September video posted to Thoughts of a Patrol Officer in which he dug into the case of Eric Noble, a library security guard who was fired for making a post on social media “regarded as offensive and insensitive,” and whose subsequent lawsuit alleging that his freedom of speech had been impeded was allowed to proceed by Ohio courts, which Badger termed “a win for First Amendment rights when it comes to public sector employees.” (The meme posted by Noble included a drawing of an SUV plowing through a trio of stick figures, accompanied by text reading, “All Lives Splatter” and “Nobody Cares About Your Protest.”)

“There’s kind of three groups of people this video is intended for. The first group of people is for public sector employees, specifically first responders, because that’s what I am,” Badger says. “Know what you can and cannot post online. And know that even offensive stuff like this can still be protected speech.”

Speaking more generally about cases involving the social media activities of first responders, Daniels of the ACLU of Ohio reiterated the First Amendment issues at play while allowing that posts appearing “to say bad things about individuals or groups or demographics” could, in some instances, create a public perception of inequality as to how laws might be enforced, which could cause headaches for enforcement agencies. “And with that,” he said, “you are impacting or interrupting the daily work of policing.”

Chenelle Jones, who expressed initial hesitation about discussing Badger owing to her belief that any attention given to his social media presence could drive more traffic to his pages, refused to pull any punches, noting that multiple complaints had been made against the officer related to the “divisive” rhetoric he uses online and expressing a total lack of shock that his name had again surfaced in such a manner. (“Basically, it was like, here we go again,” she said.)

“Nothing that he’s doing on social media, at least that I have seen, has been done to help improve community-police relations or has been informative for the community in terms of how they should interact with officers,” Jones said. “It’s just not helpful. And it’s not something the Columbus Division of Police and the City of Columbus need right now.”