The right of citizens to videotape police

[bemildred]

Twenty years ago, as Rodney King was beaten by Los Angeles police officers, a private citizen in a nearby apartment turned on his video camera. Largely because of that tape, four officers were criminally charged. In July, a homeless schizophrenic man died after a police beating in Fullerton. Audio from a cellphone video caught Kelly Thomas' cries for his father and helped force an investigation that resulted in a first-degree murder charge against one police officer.

The increasing availability of cellphones and video cameras has fundamentally changed police abuse cases, creating vital evidence in cases that were once dismissed as matters of conflicting accounts between officers and citizens. With that change, however, has come a backlash from officers who, despite court rulings upholding the right of citizens to tape police in public, have been threatening or arresting people for the "crime" of recording them. In many states, prosecutors have fought to support such claims and put citizens in jail for videotaping officers, even in cases of police abuse.

In New York this year, Emily Good was arrested after videotaping the arrest of a man at a traffic stop in Rochester. Good was filming from her frontyard; an officer is heard saying to her, "I don't feel safe with you standing behind me, so I'm going to ask you to go into your house." When she continued to film, the officer said, "You seem very anti-police," and arrested her.

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In Illinois last month, Brad Williams filed a lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department because, he said, he was beaten by police in response to his filming an officer holding and dragging a man down the street from inside a moving squad car. Ironically, Chicago has rejected complaints about the installation of thousands of cameras in the city that film citizens in public for use in prosecutions.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-turley-video-20111108,0,2342191.story

[TlalocW]

1. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Who polices the police? Who guards the guardians? Who watches the watchmen? People with smart phones do, and it's a good thing. There are going to be a lot more arrests because of this, but the courts are siding with the, "citizen journalists."

TlalocW

[Kurmudgeon]

2. I'm a Luddite who has never had a cellphone, but may be a good idea just for self defense.

Legal self defense at any rate. One might get their ass kicked by someone in authority for using one, it seems like.

[bemildred]

3. Any small digital camera will do just as well, perhaps even better.

I try to keep one handy.

[Ikonoklast]

4. No on used to really care when it was Black folks and other minorities getting their asses kicked

on a regular basis by the police with no video evidence, it was an "Oh well, he probably deserved it, or he's lying about it" type of response.

Now that White folks are being seen on video getting the same treatment from police, there is a sudden realization that maybe the people of color who have been at the wrong end of police violence all these years weren't just making stuff up about being victims of illegal brutality at the hands of the police.

[yurbud]

5. I gave my students an article on this to get their opinion in an essay

92% were in favor of letting people videotape cops. The rest were criminal justice majors (but even some criminal justice majors favored it).

[yurbud]

6. This right wing judges quote sounds like something out of THE TRIAL OF SOPHIE SCHOLL:

The ACLU lawyer had uttered just 14 words when Posner barked: "I'm not interested, really, in what you want to do with these recordings of peoples' encounters with the police." Posner then added his concerns about meddling citizens: "Once all this stuff can be recorded, there's going to be a lot more of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers.... I'm always suspicious when the civil liberties people start telling the police how to do their business."

The democratizing of technology and information is going to be the death of the oligarchy, it's just a matter of time.

[DavidDvorkin]

7. Recording will keep getting smaller

and easier to conceal, with far greater capacity. This genie is out of the bottle.