The police do not like to be photographed. They take away the offender’s camera. They say it’s illegal to make a record of what they are doing.
Then they get sued. The city or county usually loses the case. The city or county pays money to the “criminal.”
This is good. Bureaucracies change only when (1) their budgets get cut; (2) they receive bad publicity; (3) an outside board takes over monitoring them. All three strategies are needed today.
Here is another case.
Police confiscate a college student’s camera because he dared to take photos of them while he was outside his home.
He was arrested. The charges: obstruction, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct.
His attorney says he merely took photos.
The police arrested his girlfriend, too.
The police refuse to talk to the press about the details.
Add “stonewalling” to the list of stupid police tricks.
The student was sitting on his front steps. The police pulled over a vehicle. He had a camera. He took pictures. He is a journalism student.
A policeman told him to stop taking pictures. He refused, claiming Constitutional rights. It was public space.
The student says one cop said, “Public domain, yeah we’ve heard that before!”
He says they pushed him to the ground and then handcuffed him.
His girlfriend was arrested when she tried to get his camera back. The camera belongs to Temple University.
She was charged with obstruction and disorderly conduct. This went on her record. She had to do community service to get this expunged.
The head of the journalism department asked an attorney to get involved. He sees this as having a chilling effect on free speech.
Continue Reading on www.foxnews.com: http://bit.ly/CopsCamera
____________________
Published on May 16, 2012. The original is here.
They did sue the city of Philadelphia. The story is here. I was unable to discover the outcome of this lawsuit. But we do know the outcome of another lawsuit a year later. The brief cited the incident I reported. That case led to the defeat of the police department. This was posted in 2017.
Americans have a constitutional right to film on-duty police officers in public, a federal appeals court in Philadelphia ruled Friday. The three-judge panel’s decision is not the first of its kind, but it marks a significant milestone: Half of U.S. states are now covered by rulings protecting the videotaping of law enforcement.In its decision in Fields v. City of Philadelphia, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals panel said the First Amendment’s protections extended to two people who used their smartphones to record police interactions with a third party.
It gets better.
The judges’ decision solidifies a growing consensus among the federal appeals courts on this nascent issue. The First, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits have also issued similar rulings, starting in 2011, to protect bystanders who record police actions. Their collective jurisdictions now amount to exactly half of U.S. states and roughly 60 percent of the American population. No federal appeals court has ruled to the contrary; the Supreme Court has not weighed in on the subject.
We know that lawsuits have a chilling effect on police arrogance. Over the last seven years, the spread of smart phones has fundamentally changed the balance of power between the individual citizen and the police. I watch a police show, Blue Bloods. I have noticed that in recent episodes, there have been scenes of arrests made by police officers. We are also shown that whenever there is a crowd surrounding the officer and the person he is arresting, several people are videoing everything on their phones. The scriptwriters recognize that there has been a widespread rethinking by the general public about the legitimacy of recording police actions. This has to do with the declining cost of the technology, the spread of the technology throughout the society, and the use of YouTube as a way to broadcast videos. The public is no longer afraid.
© 2022 GaryNorth.com, Inc., 2005-2021 All Rights Reserved. Reproduction without permission prohibited.