He paid the police $1,836 for the footage of his own cases. The department published it to the world.

PRIMARY SOURCEtwenty-six emails, typed out in full

The requester-side email thread with the American Fork records office, April 2 to May 7, 2026, obtained by this site; AFPD’s own May 29 public footage release; and the verified complaint in the underlying civil case.

On April 2, 2026, Ben Schneider paid the American Fork Police Department $1,836.15 for the bodycam and dashcam footage of the four cases the department had opened on him, two of which ended in his arrest. What followed, in the records office’s own words, is typed out below in full: the office consulted the prosecuting attorneys and then withheld the complainant’s recorded statements; when Schneider appealed, the entire request was put on hold; the appeal authority went silent through three contacts in eight days; and the office twice promised delivery by “the end of this week.” In the middle of it sits one sentence from the paying requester, a criminal defendant writing to the records office about the evidence in his own cases: “I’m worried I’m not going to have enough time to prepare for my court case if this doesn’t resume soon.” The thread ends on May 7 with his last question unanswered. On May 29 the department published the footage to the world.

The transcript

What follows is a typed transcript of the thread, presented in time order. Message text is verbatim, including punctuation. Times are approximate where marked. Two messages were only partially visible in the capture and are noted. This site has masked three things: the requester’s personal email address, and the records office’s direct phone line and direct email address, which appear once in the office’s own message. Everything else is as written.

The clock and the money

The mechanics are simple and dated. Schneider paid $1,836.15 on April 2 for the footage of the four American Fork cases: 26AF01974 (March 8), 26AF02007 (March 9), 26AF02033 and 26AF02066, the two stalking arrests of March 10 and 11. The office itself put the volume at over 26 hours. Utah’s records act, GRAMA, sets a response clock that the requester computed in the thread: by April 15 he is writing that “the deadline is tomorrow.” The deadline passed. On May 4 the office promised completion “by the end of this week.” On May 7 it repeated the same sentence. The thread ends the same afternoon with his question, “Ok, so it should be completed by tomorrow?”, unanswered in the capture. Whether the paid request was ever delivered in full is not confirmed by any record this site holds.

The prosecutors reached in

The April 13 message is the hinge. The office writes that “subsequent to speaking with the prosecuting attorneys,” it is denying all video and audio of the complainant. Three days later it puts the rule in writing, citing two GRAMA classifications, private under 63G-2-302(2)(d) and protected under 63G-2-305(10), and extends it further: not just the complainant’s image and voice, but “any portions of the police report that may contain quotations or paraphrases” of his statements. The stated reason, twice, is that he “is the victim in the circumstances surrounding your current criminal prosecution.”

So the office processing the defendant’s paid request was, by its own account, conferring with the attorneys prosecuting him about what he would be allowed to see, and the answer was: not what the complainant said about him. The complainant is not anonymous in the public record. By the verified complaint he himself signed in the underlying civil case on May 27, 2026, the March 8 package was delivered to Josh Johnson’s residence in American Fork, logged as Case No. 26AF01974. Johnson is today a co-plaintiff, alongside BAM Franchising and the McNeffs, in the federal case against Schneider. His recorded statements to police about the dispute were withheld from the man he is suing; they remain reachable, in the ordinary course, through civil discovery in the lawsuit he chose to join.

The appeal froze everything

The April 16 denial letter told Schneider his appeal route: the City Administrator, David Bunker, within 30 days. An appeal was filed. The office’s April 20 response to the appeal was not to keep processing the unchallenged portions while the disputed portion was reviewed. It was to stop everything: “your request is on hold pending the outcome of the appeal.” GRAMA’s design runs the other way; the statute’s segregability rule (63G-2-308) requires an office to release what it can and withhold only what it must. Exercising the appeal right the city itself named became the reason the entire paid request stopped moving.

The hold also proved to be discretionary. On April 28, after one more email from the requester, the office resumed on its own: “I will continue to move forward with processing your request until I hear otherwise.” Nothing about the appeal had changed. What changed was that he asked.

Eight days, three contacts, silence

By April 23, Schneider reports that he has contacted the City Administrator three times over eight days without a response. No determination from Mr. Bunker appears anywhere in the thread, and no record this site holds shows one ever issued. Under GRAMA, an appeal authority’s silence past its deadline is itself treated as a denial that the requester can escalate. The thread shows the escalation path the city named going quiet the moment it was used.

“I’m worried I’m not going to have enough time to prepare for my court case”

The April 27 message is the center of the thread. Strip the politeness and it is a criminal defendant telling the police department prosecuting jurisdiction, in writing, that its handling of his paid records request is threatening his ability to prepare his defense.

The ability of the accused to see the state’s evidence and prepare a defense is not a courtesy; it sits at the core of due process and the Sixth Amendment. The formal channel for it is criminal discovery from the prosecutor, and this thread does not show what that channel produced. What the thread shows is the channel he was paying for, and what happened inside it: the recordings of his own encounters with officers, sold to him for $1,836.15, slowed past the statutory clock, gated by consultation with the attorneys prosecuting him, frozen outright when he appealed, and still undelivered five weeks after payment as far as the capture runs. GRAMA itself gives the subject of a record a distinct right of access to records about himself; the denial letter analyzes none of that. It treats the man in the footage like any stranger asking about someone else’s case.

Then the department published the footage to the world

Here is the sequence, each step dated:

Hold the two halves together. Through April and May, the city’s position was that this footage was so sensitive that the paying defendant’s copy had to be slowed, consulted over, partially denied, and frozen, to protect a victim and an ongoing prosecution. On May 29 the department published the same footage, redacted, to everyone on earth, as a transparency measure. Days later its own storage practices handed the world the unredacted set, the very material the April letters said had to be withheld from the one man paying for it, including third parties’ personal information the redactions existed to protect. A classification that permits worldwide voluntary release while the subject’s paid request sits unfinished is not functioning as a confidentiality rule. And the actual privacy breach in this story was committed by no requester at all; it was the department’s.

Who processes the requests

One structural fact belongs alongside the thread, and this site has already reported it: the records officer who produces AFPD’s bodycam releases shares a home, by county deed, with an AFPD sergeant identified on the raid footage as head of investigations. The records office is two people. Nothing in this thread is evidence that its author made any redaction decision improperly, and the thread shows her tone as consistently courteous; the point is not personal and this site alleges no misconduct by her. The point is architectural: in a case where what gets cut is the story, the cutting room sits inside the household of the unit whose conduct is on the film. Files this consequential deserve a custodian with no stake in either direction, and a written determination from the appeal authority rather than silence.

The fair counterpoint. Victim-privacy classifications are real law, and consulting prosecutors about records in an open prosecution is lawful and ordinary. Twenty-six hours of multi-case footage is a genuinely heavy redaction load for a two-person records office, and delivery estimates slip in small offices without any bad intent. The first acknowledgment is only partially visible in the capture and may have contained scheduling notices this record does not show. The hold during the appeal was explained as avoiding duplicated work, a plausible administrative reason, and processing resumed within days. The department’s May 29 posting was itself a transparency measure in response to intense public attention, and its chief used it to state there were no active Utah warrants for Schneider. Criminal discovery, not GRAMA, is the primary channel by which a defendant receives the state’s evidence, and nothing here shows what that channel provided him. Schneider’s charges are unadjudicated and he is presumed innocent; the records staff and the City Administrator are likewise presumed to have acted in good faith, and this entry alleges no misconduct by any of them. What this entry asserts is what the correspondence itself shows: the dates, the rule, the hold, the silence, and the sequence.

Read the full record

The footage this thread is about is viewable in this site’s synced multi-camera player, including what the public release cut. The records officer’s household is documented in the June 24 entry. A separate agency, Provo Police, and a separate records story, the secret warrant for the journalist’s Google account, run on their own track; the two departments should not be conflated. The pattern section is The takedown.

Sources: a typed transcript of the requester-side email thread with the American Fork records office (records@americanfork.gov), twenty-six messages, April 2 to May 7, 2026, obtained by this site and presented in time order; message text verbatim, times approximate where marked, two messages only partially visible in the capture, and three items masked by this site (the requester’s personal email address and the office’s direct phone line and direct email). Also: AFPD Chief Cameron Paul’s May 29, 2026 news release and public footage posting (56 clips as counted by this site); trade-press coverage of the June exposure of the unredacted set (Kotaku, Dexerto), mirrored to the Internet Archive on June 3, 2026; the verified complaint of May 27, 2026 in the underlying civil case, signed by Josh Johnson, which describes the March 8 delivery to his American Fork residence and cites Case No. 26AF01974; Utah Code 63G-2-302, -305, -308 (the classifications and segregability rule the letters invoke); and this site’s June 24 entry on the records office (county deed record). This entry reports the correspondence and the public record; it draws no conclusion about any person’s intent.

The BAM Map is independent reporting on matters of public concern. Nothing here is a finding of any person’s guilt; the criminal charges referenced are unadjudicated and every defendant is presumed innocent. Sources are linked so readers can check the record.  ·  Home · Map · The law · Bodycam