Three weeks. Nineteen modules. A cohort taught live by the General Counsel of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association. You will leave able to handle a body-worn camera request without guessing.
THE MODULE NO ONE ELSE TEACHES
MODULE 14
Body-Worn Camera and Digital Evidence Requests
Footage on a vendor’s cloud is a public record. Control, not location. That is the easy part. The hard part is a single clip holding a victim, a juvenile, a bystander, and an officer — and the segregability analysis, redaction burden, chargeable time, defensible fee estimate, format of production, and retention schedule that follow from it — then the request for footage that has already aged out. No other Massachusetts public records training addresses this seriously.
WHAT A GRADUATE CAN DO
✦ Justify a withholding that holds. Five checks — authority, target, reason and harm, segregability, plain language — run against every redaction before it leaves the building.
✦ Route what isn’t a request. Subpoenas, court orders, discovery demands, litigation holds, preservation letters. All arrive addressed to the RAO. None is a public records request.
✦ Survive the hard week. The officer-involved shooting, the reporter, the data broker filing forty requests a month.
✦ Apply the current law. Mack v. Bristol DA (2024), the booking-photo and CORI rule, POST-era discipline records, AI prompts and outputs as records.
✦ Change the department, not just the person. Module 7 sends a certified RAO home with a program, a written policy, a tracking log, and an audit checklist.
BUILT FOR THE ROLE, NOT FOR LAWYERS
✦ Taught by MCOPA’s General Counsel. A credibility anchor most training vendors cannot claim. Eric Atstupenas counsels more than 400 chiefs and their departments.
✦ Current as of 2026, reviewed annually. The case law in this program is newer than the case law in most departments’ policies.
✦ Real requests, real redactions. Practitioner voice throughout. Every exemption module runs a drafting loop: model, guided, independent, critique.
✦ A cohort, not a video library. Live Q&A every Wednesday, a graded forum, and three unit assessments with a cumulative final that gates the certificate.
✦ Prerequisites. Current or soon-to-be records access officers and records supervisors. No legal training assumed.
THE THREE WEEKS
Foundations and the Request Lifecycle
The presumption. The RAO. Intake, the ten-day clock, fees, extensions, appeals, retention and lawful destruction — and how to build a department program around all of it.
MODULES 1 – 7
Exemptions and Defensible Withholding
The Specificity Scorecard first, then every exemption a public safety agency actually uses: (a), (c), (f), the remainder, attorney-client privilege, and the post-Mack personnel and internal affairs file.
MODULES 8 – 13
Applied Practice: The Hard Requests
Body-worn camera. Subpoenas. Media and high-profile incidents. Commercial and serial requesters. ALPR, drones, and AI. Then drafting, petitions, and a capstone worked from intake to production.
MODULES 14 – 19
Not sure which Public Records course is best for you? Here are your options:
