At 4:10 p.m. on Dec. 17, Boulder police received a 911 call from a driver who said they were approached by a woman who had a gun in the driveway of the North Boulder Recreation Center.

Two minutes later, police arrived on the scene and located a woman near the rec center. According to a press conference the department gave shortly after, the woman did not cooperate with police and fled north on Broadway on foot. The woman was seen removing what appeared to be a firearm from her purse, prompting police to use less lethal forms of force against her, to no avail.

When these less-lethal tools failed, police officers shot the woman eight times. She was declared dead 40 minutes later.

The interaction lasted mere minutes. From the time police arrived on the scene to when the woman, 51-year-old Jeanette Alatorre, was shot, just 14 minutes elapsed.

But to this day, the public has still not had the opportunity to view unedited body camera footage of those 14 tragic minutes. What the city has done is release a 9-minute, 34-second video with clips of the incident and a narrator explaining the police response. This, though, has not been enough for those interested in accountability, including Alatorre’s daughter.

And that makes a certain amount of sense. Not only is nine minutes not long enough to cover the full encounter according to the police’s timeline, but it also lacks all the various perspectives of all the officers involved — information that is key in determining the full picture of the incident.

On the other hand, it also makes sense for it to be difficult for the department to release unedited video footage. It is difficult to prepare hours of raw footage for release — for instance, care has to be taken to protect the privacy of bystanders — and it is also expensive. It takes time and resources and expertise.

But when news outlets requested the unedited video, the fees the department requested were unreasonably excessive.

When Yellow Scene Magazine requested the footage, the city reportedly charged $2,857.50. When Boulder Reporting Lab asked, the city said it would cost an astonishing $8,484.

That is an exceedingly poor reflection of transparency from our police department and an apparent disregard of Colorado’s Enhance Law Enforcement Integrity act, which requires police agencies to release all unedited video and audio recordings of an incident in which there has been a complaint of police officer misconduct.

In April, Yellow Scene Magazine decided to sue. Attorneys for the magazine said in a statement that the city conditioned the release of the footage “on the requestor’s payment of exorbitant fees, which effectively shields the unedited video from public disclosure.” And thankfully, a judge has now sided with the magazine and ruled that Boulder government officials cannot charge such prohibitive rates for what should be public information.

This is a vital win for transparency — and for the public’s access to public information more generally.

To be absolutely clear, we are not questioning the narrative that has been given for this tragic interaction. Nor are we claiming that officers were not justified in responding to the perceived threat that Alatorre might have posed to officers or to the community with lethal force. (Though we do like to imagine a world where CIRT and CARE teams and behavioral health experts can de-escalate these situations before they turn deadly — before lethal force is ever justifiable.)

However, a functioning police department relies on the trust of its community — the belief from those who it is serving that they are safe and their best interests are being served. And this trust is predicated on transparency because transparency is necessary for accountability.

Of course, police departments do have a right to charge fees to individuals who want to inspect criminal justice records under the Colorado Criminal Justice Records Act. But these fees should not be prohibitive.

The same holds true for all government agencies.

Late last year it was reported that one area community charged thousands of dollars to fulfill public records requests, claiming they had no choice but to do so in certain instances.

Similarly, the Camera’s requests for documents from CU not only face fees but excessive delays, especially when related to big stories that have the potential to paint the university in a negative light. When seeking information for a series on disability and discrimination at the school, the Camera was charged $100 for a batch of records. And in at least one instance, it took well over a month for the university to provide one specific document, despite the three-day expectation set out in the Colorado Open Records Act.

These fees vary drastically. Some might argue that paying $100 for a public record is not too much to ask. But $8,484 is certainly a lot to ask to ensure our police department is acting with integrity.

More to the point though, these records are public. They are supposed to be available to everyone — because they are the records of public bodies that are funded with our tax dollars. If a government agency is genuinely struggling to provide records without charging excessive fees, something in their process needs to change. Providing reasonable access to public records should be part of the cost of doing business as a taxpayer-funded body.

It is important to remember here that the Camera and Yellow Scene and the Boulder Reporting Lab are pursuing transparency on behalf of the public.

As the Fourth Estate, our job is to provide a thorough accounting of the actions of elected officials and public bodies so that the public can hold them accountable. And, as financially stretched as news organizations may be, when the fees aren’t unreasonable or simply out of reach, we are going to fork out money to access these documents — because our readers have a right to them.

But sometimes an individual might need (or simply want) access to a document or record for their own purposes, and that individual might lack the resources of a newspaper, potentially making that ostensibly public record inaccessible.

That’s not right.

It is not easy to make and retain and recall documents and records. It takes time and it takes resources and it takes people, and all of these things cost money.

But when it comes to government bodies, public records must be public in all senses of the word — available to those who request them and reasonably accessible.

Gary Garrison for the Editorial Board