The worst 40 minutes of April’s life are a hit on YouTube. The lengthy, humiliating clip has 195,000 views and more than a thousand comments, nearly all insults and jokes at April’s expense. It includes her full name, unobscured face, and clear voice. April can’t bring herself to watch it through, but she’s read every comment. She fantasizes, sometimes, about replying, letting everyone know that she’s no longer the person in that video. “This is April,” she would write, “and I’ve now been sober for three years.”
It happened during the pandemic, back when April’s addiction was at its worst. She was in her third year of college, and her small southern city was a sleepy place. Just about the only thing to do, she tells me, was drink. And so she drank. On the night in question, she got into a fight with her best friend: It was late, they were a few shots in, and things got heated. He stormed out, and she drove off to look for him. She was “completely tweaked.” She crashed into a parked car and was arrested on the spot. The video starts as the officer steps from his cruiser, clicking on his body camera. April looks frantic and disheveled. She protests that she’s sober and tries to talk her way out of things. That doesn’t work, and the video ends at the county jail. The commenters call her a “liar” and a “brat.”
April was sentenced to a year’s probation, and during that period, she changed a lot in her life. She took time off school and joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Her family supported her recovery, even attending her two-year celebration. Today, her life is markedly different. Three years clean, she’s finished her degree and now works as a schoolteacher. Her job is exhausting, but she has a sense of purpose: She’s fulfilling a lifelong ambition. She’s in a relationship, too, and she’s finally feeling a little more grounded.
April keeps a wry sense of humor, and together with friends from AA, she’s able to laugh about the bad old days. In fact, it was with pals from her program, sitting in a Chili’s, that she discovered the video. Everyone had been Googling each other’s mug shots, sharing in the gallows humor of recovery. April plugged in her name, followed by the letters “D-U-I.” The video popped right up. “It was very surreal,” she says. “Nobody reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna post a video of you on the internet!’” But there it was, in high-definition, labeled with all her identifying information — even her license plate. Maybe it was a good thing, one of her friends joked. “Maybe you’re gonna be the Hawk Tuah girl.” But April’s mind raced. Would her family see it? What would happen if the school found the video? Would she lose her job?
The video continues to rack up views and snide comments. The school, to April’s knowledge, still hasn’t seen it. She tries to stay upbeat about it all. One of the things they teach you in AA, she reminds me, is that “the reason I’ve gone through everything I’ve gone through is so that I can share it with another person.” It’s a noble idea, and she wants to believe it. But the endless, embarrassing footage of her arrest — did that really need to be shared with hundreds of thousands of people for all eternity?
What April has been through is a nightmare — and yet, in a way, she’s one of the lucky ones. Her video only has a couple hundred-thousand views, not 3.3 million, like the girl in Washington who was arrested after drunkenly falling asleep at a Taco Bell drive-through. She only offers small talk, not futile attempts at seduction, like the young woman in New Jersey who became an online celebrity for flirting through an arrest. And she only experiences a talking-to before she’s handcuffed, not the 15-minute embarrassment of a failed field sobriety test, like most drunk drivers online. The unlucky ones have been watched and mocked millions of times; they have been ogled, insulted, and abused. They are mostly women, mostly between 18 and 25, and mostly powerless to stop their online humiliations. So far, YouTube channels featuring such videos have generated over a billion views and counting.
It’s an industry that couldn’t exist without the widespread adoption of body cameras by police departments across the country. The technology took off around 2014, the same year that an unarmed Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri. In the aftermath of Brown’s death, working to repair community trust in police, President Obama directed the Justice Department to provide grants for municipalities to acquire cameras. “This is a problem that is national,” he said, “but it’s a solvable problem.” Today, around 80 percent of large departments are equipped with cameras, and polls indicate broad support from the public.
Advocates say the devices capture misconduct that in different times might have been swept under the rug. Numerous high-profile cases have proved them right: In 2024, body cams captured the fatal beating of Robert Brooks upstate at the Marcy Correctional Facility, which resulted in murder charges against six correctional officers, and in 2025, video of the shooting of Sonya Massey at her home in Illinois led to the murder conviction of a deputy who responded to her 911 call. One field study in California found use-of-force incidents were halved after the introduction of cameras. A report published by the National Bureau of Economic Research indicated cameras were “closing racial gaps” in police-misconduct investigations. Recently, body cams have helped courts monitor ICE’s violent raids in Chicago, and Kristi Noem announced that “effective immediately” the Department of Homeland Security would begin using them in Minneapolis. “To simply trust that police officers will do the right thing is naïve,” former ACLU-NJ director of Supreme Court advocacy Alexander Shalom tells me. Cameras, he says, apply the necessary “outside pressure” to keep conduct aboveboard.
But footage from cameras is only useful if it’s made available to the public and the press; transparency is contingent on access. In turn, states have scrambled to regulate the release of recordings. The most lenient turn over almost everything, redacting only footage of minors and particularly sensitive scenes. Stricter jurisdictions require the consent of those filmed (Wyoming) or treat all recordings as closed investigations (Kansas). Blue states are more likely than red states to mandate cameras and far more likely to make recordings public.
For the first few years of camera use, footage requests came generally from defendants, attorneys, and journalists. Lawyers wanted evidence; reporters wanted to see what happened. But soon a different genre of requests began to trickle in. YouTubers and TikTokers with viral policing accounts started to request footage for their channels. They wanted lively, contentious arrests: DUIs, underage drinking, crimes committed on nights out. They wanted college towns, girls dressed for clubbing, thumbnails sure to win a click.
There are now more than 150 YouTube channels devoted to the unredacted arrests of everyday people. The most popular uploads are the most salacious and humiliating: “When Suspects Try to FLIRT With Cops” boasts 7.9 million views; “Hooters Waitress Tells Cop ‘I Can Take It All Off’” claims 2.4 million; and “Bodycam: Exotic Dancer Tries to Seduce Cop, Throws ‘Drunk’ Tantrum, and Pees Herself in Squad Car” has been viewed 3.4 million times.
The way it tends to go, Andrew Caggiano, president of the New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police, tells me, is that first someone files an Open Public Records Act request for every DUI in his township. Then, they filter the list to exclude male names, and, finally, they request arrest footage for the rest. In a few months’ time, the videos pop up: young women slurring their words, stumbling around during their arrests. Caggiano is fairly sickened by the whole thing. “If one of my daughters made the mistake and got arrested, she goes to court, she takes responsibility, and pays her price, that should be it,” he says. “Not that this gets blasted all over the internet. You’re seeing people at their worst time. Why should that follow them for the rest of their lives?”
Christine Rivera, the city clerk of Las Cruces, New Mexico, says it’s the same story there. In the past three years, the clerk’s office has been inundated by public-records requests, which increased 140 percent from 2024 to 2025. Rivera believes some of the filers switch between fake names, first using police blotter to search for colorful arrests, then filtering to target women. “We have been told,” she says, “that we are on some kind of list for requesters stating that we are a municipality that is easy to get records from.” Inevitably the footage ends up on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.
Rivera fielded one call from a woman who wanted to know why her granddaughter had ended up on YouTube, cowering beside her mother during an arrest for shoplifting. Rivera said her hands were tied: She couldn’t redact someone in the background of a video, and the request itself was legitimate. “We even had complaints like, ‘I can’t believe the city is shaming this person,’” the city’s communications director, Mandy Leatherwood, tells me. “There is not always a clear understanding once that video gets posted that the city, or the Las Cruces Police Department, did not post it.”
Someone else did — someone like the man who uploaded April’s arrest, whose page boasts hundreds of similar videos. I exchanged emails with him over the course of a few months. He was courteous, straightforward, and wanted to remain anonymous (a privilege, I couldn’t help but notice, that was not afforded to the subjects of his videos). He told me his channel offers a public service: His videos “illustrate the consequences of drunken driving, shoplifting, and other illicit activities.” His uploads, he said, “educate people and deter them from engaging in those activities.”
Many of his viewers feel the same way. In comments, they discuss the dangers of drunk driving, even mourning loved ones lost (“HIS child is still alive,” one woman writes, “MINE isn’t”). “Honestly,” observes another, “the possibility that your dui is going to end up on youtube is another incentive” not to drive drunk.
I asked the uploader why the majority of his videos featured women, when some 80 percent of DUIs are committed by men. “I cannot control what others want to watch,” he replied, “or what the algorithm ultimately chooses to promote.” Was he concerned, I asked, that his videos might haunt their subjects long after posting, particularly in the era of AI facial-recognition tools? He told me “basic information regarding who got arrested” has always been public, and he compared his videos to police blotters, long a gossipy feature of local papers. I later ask Chief Caggiano about that comparison. He doesn’t buy it. “There’s a distinct difference between the two,” he says. “Say there’s a drunk driver, and they throw up on themselves, they urinate on themselves. That doesn’t show up in the police blotter — but that’ll show up on the video.”
The more humiliating the arrest, of course, the better the content. The most viral videos can be devastating for their subjects, damaging relationships with family and friends, frustrating job searches, and scarring psyches. Subjects have little legal recourse: claims of defamation and false light are extremely difficult to prove, New Jersey defamation attorney Samuel Fineman tells me, unless a video has been extensively editorialized. For a direct upload without commentary, there’s little to no case. “Intentional infliction of emotional distress” is another claim some lawyers favor, but that, too, is constrained by a newsworthiness privilege. There’s no suing YouTube or Facebook: Section 230 of the Communications Act, which largely shields content providers from responsibility for videos on their platforms, removes that option.
Some subjects have complained to channel owners, then been shaken down for a fee. This is a variant on “mug-shot extortion,” a practice in which websites acquire booking photos of recent arrests, post them online, and remove them only when compensated. Ohio attorney Sarah Kolick, who specializes in online takedowns, tells me that if a client of hers received a reasonable offer from an uploader, she’d probably encourage them to take it. “You don’t want more attention drawn,” she says. “Most of these clients want it resolved as soon as possible, because once it spreads, users are constantly downloading and reuploading files.” April’s video is proof: Her arrest has been reposted on Facebook (another 60,000 views) and reuploaded on a different YouTube channel. I ask April if she has ever thought about fighting the video in court. “That’s just not something that’s in the cards,” she tells me. On her teacher’s salary, there is no way she could afford the legal fees.
How, exactly, did we get from police officers documenting lawful arrests in service of transparency to shadowy YouTubers pocketing ad dollars and extortion fees from humiliating recordings of everyday people? By all accounts it was a legislative accident — and if there’s going to be a fix, it will have to be a legislative one.
Drew Hansen, a state senator for Washington State who introduced a comprehensive bill on body-cam footage in 2016, tells me it was “by far one of the most complex pieces of legislation that I’ve worked on in my almost 15 years of public service.” It was an “enormously thorny, vexing, difficult” bill to write, balancing “the public’s right to know with people’s reasonable privacy expectations.” Ultimately, his bill relied on a standard from common law: Anything “not of legitimate concern to the public” was prohibited from release, including footage captured inside medical facilities and footage of domestic-violence victims. But the bill predates the online humiliation industry, so it isn’t quite tooled to address videos like April’s. Hansen tells me its language “might be broad enough to cover that kind of situation,” but that is really a question for the courts. “We’re always open to take another look,” he says, but more restrictive rules might end up “creating more problems than they solve.”
Other states are struggling with the same problem. Sean T. Kean, a New Jersey assemblyman, says he’s sick of his constituents becoming “international celebrities because of a bad night.” He has proposed a bill that would prohibit the release of body-cam recordings without approval from the video’s subject. “If you believe you were mistreated, racially profiled, you decide you want to release,” Kean says. Enough of these requests from “members of the general public with prurient interests.” Are journalists, I ask Kean, lumped in with that general public? “With all due respect,” he replies, “I don’t believe that a reporter should be reviewing all that.”
Some officials have explored blurring subjects’ faces: The cameras, Chief Caggiano reminds me, are really there to capture the officer’s conduct, not the subject’s. But advocates point out that a subject’s identity might matter too — what happens when a local politician gets special treatment from police? In Ohio, lawmakers are hoping to discourage bulk requests with new footage fees of up to $75 per hour. But that measure risks excluding inquiries from low-income people — precisely those most likely to be victims of police violence.
Attorney CJ Griffin, one of New Jersey’s leading transparency advocates, is reluctant to support any legislation that makes it harder to monitor police misconduct. “If we were to make our laws around what some individual person wants to be public,” she tells me, “we would have no transparency around anything.” Griffin and I discuss the crop of exploitative channels focused on young women. She is blunt: “My response would be: Don’t get a DWI.” Later she tempers that a little: “I don’t want to sound unsympathetic, because I am.” But once you “start exempting all sorts of videos or requiring all this redaction,” a private harm turns public.
Shalom, the former ACLU attorney, makes a similar point. “The public interest in knowing the way that people are interacting with government,” he says, “outweighs, generally, a person’s personal interest in not being embarrassed.” He thinks the viral videos of young women being humiliated are “coercive” and “gross,” but “in the mind-run of cases, it’s a trade-off that society should be prepared to accept.”
He brings up the case of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager killed by a Chicago police officer. Initially, the police department claimed that McDonald had lunged at the officer with a knife, justifying the shots he fired. The department sat on a recording of the shooting for over a year, releasing it only after a court order. In the footage, McDonald can be seen walking away from the police before he’s shot. As he falls to the ground, he’s shot again — and again. After the video’s release, the officer who killed him was convicted of second-degree murder; McDonald’s family received a settlement from the city. Would the outcome have been the same without a video? Shalom doesn’t think so. Occasional online humiliations, he tells me, are an “unfortunate price to pay for the broader interest in transparency.”
I talk to April about that logic. Though she understands Shalom’s point, she is frustrated by the either/or: She can’t accept that the only way “to help one set of marginalized people is by punishing another set of marginalized people.” The videos, she points out, are usually of young women like herself: “I’ve never seen a dude.” Why is it incumbent on these women to suffer, all to prevent injustices that shouldn’t be occurring in the first place?
The problem may seem acutely modern, the product of the internet age and the surveillance state. But it has roots in an old American tradition. Back in 1900, a young Theodore Dreiser toured one of the country’s busiest whipping posts for a report on public shaming. Lashings, he was told, were something of a local pastime. He was unnerved by what he saw: crowds that “gaped with wide-eyed interest, winced unanimously at each separate lash, smiled sometimes at the contortions of the victim.” He heard loud cheers of “Serves him right!”
Dreiser was particularly troubled by the young people “caught in some early and thoughtless offense,” now “permanently ruined in reputation.” The system, he felt, chastened all the wrong people. Public shaming only really affected “the man with conscience and feeling” who was disgraced before his peers. The hardened criminal, on the other hand, didn’t care; the individual already outside society could hardly be excluded from it further
“Public humiliation,” April points out a century later, “doesn’t prevent people from doing things.” She should know: “I saw the clips when I was drinking. It didn’t stop me from getting arrested.” The videos used to come up on her TikTok; she’d scroll through and stare. “Part of the kick of watching videos like that,” she says, “is to feel holier-than-thou.” It inflates your ego, watching others flounder, drunk and confused. Then one day the person in the video is you.
It’s now been almost two years since the video was posted. April has shared the secret with some friends in recovery and almost no one else. Her parents still don’t know about it. I ask her if she’ll ever tell them. “No,” she says and then she pauses. “I think it would hurt them.”
When April and I first spoke, she was a paraprofessional, working with special-education students. Since then, she’s moved up to the classroom full time. Her students are keeping her busy, but she says it’s a good kind of tired, and she loves the work. She’s proud of where she’s gotten herself — how sharply she’s turned the corner. But the albatross still hangs. “I’m finally where I want to be in my career,” she says. “I feel like I’m in this great place. And it’s like, This is still on the internet, for everyone to see.”
