Missouri Dash Cams: No Mounting Statute, and a Carve-Out in the Hands Free Law

The absence is real and it is provable from the code's own index. The Revisor of Statutes full-text search returns no section for dash camera, no section for dashboard camera, no section for obstructed view, no section for driver's view and no section for nontransparent material. The phrase obstruct the view matches only two sections, Section 227.220 on highway advertising signs and Section 407.985 on window signs in convenience stores, neither of which touches a vehicle windshield. Missouri simply never enacted the sentence that most states carry, the one barring any object placed on the windshield that obstructs the driver's clear view. Chapter 307 regulates glazing, mirrors and wipers, but nothing in it addresses objects mounted to the glass.

What Missouri does have is a dash cam exception written into its distracted driving law. Section 304.822.3(7) prohibits an operator from recording, posting, sending or broadcasting video, including a video conference, on an electronic communication device, and then adds that the prohibition shall not apply to electronic devices used for the sole purpose of continually monitoring operator behavior by recording or broadcasting video within or outside the vehicle. A dash cam or a fleet driver-facing camera is exactly that device. The definition in Section 304.822.2(2)(b) points the same way from the other direction: it excludes from the term electronic communication device any global positioning system receivers, security, navigation, communication, or remote diagnostics systems permanently affixed to the vehicle, so a hardwired camera integrated as a security system is outside the statute entirely rather than merely excused from one subdivision. Note that a phone propped on the dash and left running a recording app is not automatically safe: the exemption turns on sole purpose and continual monitoring, and Section 304.822.3(1) separately bars physically holding or supporting an electronic communication device with any part of your body, which is why the camera has to be in a mount rather than in your hand.

For placement, the only quantified line in Missouri law is in the Highway Patrol's motor vehicle inspection rule. 11 CSR 50-2.270(4) instructs the inspector that the driver's vision area is the area within the normal sweep of the wiper blades above a line measured four inches from the bottom of the windshield, and subsection (5)(C) makes an inspector reject a vehicle when aftermarket vision reducing material or other conditions that obscure the driver's vision are on the windshield. A camera suction-cupped into the middle of the wiper sweep is a condition on the windshield inside that defined area. Two placements avoid the problem: tucked high and tight behind the rearview mirror, where the body of the camera is hidden by the mirror itself, or low on the dash below the four-inch line. Section 307.173.2 supplies the parallel principle for the statute side, permitting labels, stickers, decalcomania and informational signs on a vehicle provided such material does not interfere with the driver's normal view of the road. Remember too that the Missouri inspection sticker goes on the inside of the windshield in the lower left-hand corner under 11 CSR 50-2.110(2), and a medical window tinting permit sticker sits just above it under 11 CSR 30-7.010(3)(C), so the lower left corner is already spoken for.

The inspection risk is smaller than it sounds, because Missouri's safety inspection is biennial and narrow. Section 307.350.1(1) exempts motor vehicles having less than one hundred fifty thousand miles for the ten-year period following their model year of manufacture, and Section 307.350.1(3) exempts historic motor vehicles registered under Section 301.131. Even model year vehicles are inspected in even calendar years and odd model year vehicles in odd years. A newer car with an aggressively placed camera will not meet an inspector at all.

Audio is the question most Missouri dash cam owners get wrong. Missouri's wiretap act reaches wire communications, defined in Section 542.400(12) as communications carried by the aid of wire, cable or other like connection, and Section 542.402.2(3) permits a person not acting under law to intercept one where that person is a party or a party consented, unless the interception is for the purpose of committing a criminal or tortious act. Oral communication is treated separately and far more narrowly: Section 542.402.1(2) reaches the use of a device to intercept an oral communication only when the device transmits communications by radio or interferes with the transmission of the communication. A dash cam that records cabin audio to a memory card does neither, so the Missouri wiretap act does not reach it. Recording a passenger's conversation in your own car is not a Missouri wiretapping offense.

There is no charge for where you mount a camera, because Missouri has no statute on the point. The consequences are an inspection rejection and, if you cross into phone territory, a hands free ticket. 355 makes a current certificate of inspection and approval a precondition of registration or transfer, so the camera has to move before the sticker issues. 6 a hands free violation is an infraction, with the court required to impose a fine of up to one hundred fifty dollars for a first conviction, up to two hundred fifty dollars where there is one prior conviction within twenty-four months, and up to five hundred dollars for two or more priors or for a violation in a work zone with workers present or in a marked school zone.

The offense escalates to a class D misdemeanor where it proximately causes over five thousand dollars of property damage, a class B misdemeanor for serious physical injury, and a class D felony for a death. 8 says a violation may not be used to establish probable cause for any other violation. An officer stopping a noncommercial vehicle must also tell the driver of the right to decline a search of the device, and no warrant may issue to confiscate or access it unless the violation caused serious bodily injury or death.