Last September, public defender Ryan Dischinger was gathering evidence for a case tied to an alleged burglary on West Jefferson Street.
Knowing the city uses surveillance cameras, Dischinger asked for copies of 24 hours’ worth of footage from a roughly three-block radius around the scene to see who may have been coming or going from the area.
Keeping with a recent pattern of refusing to disclose location details about the city’s surveillance apparatus, Louisville Metro government officials wouldn’t provide the recordings. City open records staff said releasing the footage to Dischinger would reveal the locations of various cameras and in turn make them less effective at fighting crime, could expose the city’s vulnerabilities to terrorism, and would cost taxpayer money relocating the cameras to new vantage points…