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Illegal To Photograph/Video/Audio Record the Police (1 Viewer)

goonsquad

goonsquad

Think different.
I only posted the beginning of the article; full text linked below.

Are Cameras the New Guns?

In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.

Even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists.

The legal justification for arresting the "shooter" rests on existing wiretapping or eavesdropping laws, with statutes against obstructing law enforcement sometimes cited. Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the 12 states in which all parties must consent for a recording to be legal unless, as with TV news crews, it is obvious to all that recording is underway. Since the police do not consent, the camera-wielder can be arrested. Most all-party-consent states also include an exception for recording in public places where "no expectation of privacy exists" (Illinois does not) but in practice this exception is not being recognized.

Massachusetts attorney June Jensen represented Simon Glik who was arrested for such a recording. She explained, "[T]he statute has been misconstrued by Boston police. You could go to the Boston Common and snap pictures and record if you want." Legal scholar and professor Jonathan Turley agrees, "The police are basing this claim on a ridiculous reading of the two-party consent surveillance law - requiring all parties to consent to being taped. I have written in the area of surveillance law and can say that this is utter nonsense."

The courts, however, disagree. A few weeks ago, an Illinois judge rejected a motion to dismiss an eavesdropping charge against Christopher Drew, who recorded his own arrest for selling one-dollar artwork on the streets of Chicago. Although the misdemeanor charges of not having a peddler's license and peddling in a prohibited area were dropped, Drew is being prosecuted for illegal recording, a Class I felony punishable by 4 to 15 years in prison.
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LinkETA: Updated thread title to include video/audio recording.

 
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I've read a lot about this recently, in many different jurisdictions, and it seems pretty asinine to make the recording of public acts by public servants in public illegal.

A video camera recording something happening out on the streets is not "wiretapping"... I think the cities and states that are prosecuting these cases have it all backwards, and I'd hope that the legislatures and/or the people start carving out some exceptions soon.

 
I live in Chicago and have taken photos of police officers on public property without incident. As I understand it, Drew is being prosecuted specifically for audiotaping.

ETA: That said, I hope he gets the law overturned.

 
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So wouldn't this mean that all those gov't controlled traffic, speed and redlight cameras are illegally wiretapping?

 
Reason's Radley Balko (there are links in the original to other stories & incidents):

Last week, an Illinois judge rejected Chicago artist Christopher Drew’s motion to dismiss the Class I felony charge against him. Drew is charged with violating the state’s eavesdropping statute when he recorded his encounter with a police officer last December on the streets of Chicago. A Class I felony in Illinois is punishable by 4 to 15 years in prison. It’s in the same class of crimes as sexual assault. Drew will be back in court in June to request a jury trial.

I’m currently working on a feature for Reason about man in a more rural part of the state charged with six violations of the same statute, all of them for making audio recordings of on-duty public officials. For several of the counts in that case, the police were actually on the man’s property. He started recording his conversations with police because he felt he was being unjustly harassed for violating a town ordinance he thought was unconstitutional.

Like our host, I’m of the opinion that it should always be legal to record on-duty police officers, both as a matter of policy and under the free speech, free press, and right to petition the government provisions in the First Amendment. We saw the power and potential of audio and video recording technology to expose government abuse in the Iranian protests last summer. But we also see it here in the U.S. with the thousands of police misconduct videos uploaded to YouTube in recent years.

Typically, police who want to arrest someone for recording them while on duty use a strained interpretation of state wiretapping laws or whatever state or local law addresses obstructing or interfering with law enforcement. These incidents are troubling enough, and I think state legislatures should consider passing laws explicitly making it legal to record on-duty law enforcement officials. Those laws should include remedies for people wrongly arrested, or who have had their cameras or cell phones illegally confiscated, damaged, or destroyed.

But in Illinois the situation is quite a bit worse. In Illinois it actually is illegal to make audio recordings of on-duty cops–or any other public official. Illinois is one of a handful of states that require all parties to consent before someone can record a conversation. But the other all-party-consent states also include a provision in their statutes stating that for there to be a violation of the law the nonconsenting party must have a reasonable expectation of privacy. On-duty police officers in public spaces have no such expectation.

Here’s where it gets even worse: Originally, the Illinois eavesdropping law did also include a similar expectation of privacy provision. But the legislature stripped that provision out in 1994, and they did so in response to an incident in which a citizen recorded his interaction with two on-duty police officers. In other words, the Illinois legislature specifically intended to make it a Class I felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, to make an audio recording of an on-duty police officer without his permission.

Given the spate of recent stories about cops in Chicago caught on video misbehaving (some of whom were subsequently held accountable only because of the video), the legislature’s already-awful-when-it-passed 1994 amendment hasn’t aged well.

I suspect most state officials know this law is unconstitutional. While several people have been charged under the statute for recording public officials, I’ve so far been unable to find anyone who was actually convicted, much less had a conviction upheld. (If you know of someone who has, please email me!) Prosecutors tend to either drop the charges or offer a plea bargain before the case gets to trial. It isn’t difficult to see why someone would take a misdemeanor plea and a clean record instead of challenging a bad law and risking up to 15 years in prison and a felony record if they lose.

Before Drew the closest anyone came to challenging the law came in 2004, when documentary filmmaker Patrick Thompson was arrested for recording police interactions with patrons outside of bars and restaurants in Champaign-Urbana. He was looking to document allegations that police were treating white patrons differently than black patrons. (See the ACLU’s brief on Thompson’s behalf here). But Thompson took a plea bargain before his case went to trial.

So the law remains on the books. Which Illinois police officers remain authorized by state law to detain, arrest, and jail people who record them while on-duty, and they can continue to confiscate the recordings.

(Cross-posted at Reason’s Hit & Run.)

UPDATE/CORRECTION: Eugene Volokh emails to say that Massachusetts also doesn’t appear to recognize an expectation of privacy exception to its all-party-consent law, and has upheld a conviction for recording on-duty police officers.
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Edit: forgot to link to original. :)

 
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videoguy505 said:
I've read a lot about this recently, in many different jurisdictions, and it seems pretty asinine to make the recording of public acts by public servants in public illegal. A video camera recording something happening out on the streets is not "wiretapping"... I think the cities and states that are prosecuting these cases have it all backwards, and I'd hope that the legislatures and/or the people start carving out some exceptions soon.
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It's obviously becoming a 'protect our own' mentality from the police all the way up through the prosecutors and judges. Very scary, recording these incidents are often the only way to keep the police accountable for their actions.
 
Here's a recent case in MD.

Md. wiretapping law needs an update

Citizens should be allowed to videotape police stops

June 01, 2010

Anthony Graber is facing felony charges today. His crime? Recording a traffic stop with a video camera — supposedly prohibited in Maryland under an archaic "anti-wiretapping" statute that is well past due for a revisit by the General Assembly.

Mr. Graber was riding his motorcycle on I-95 in Maryland, speeding and popping wheelies and recording the experience with a helmet cam. An unmarked car cut him off as he slowed for traffic, and a man in a sweatshirt and jeans jumped out with a gun in his hand. Five seconds after the armed man exited his vehicle and approached Mr. Graber, he identified himself as a Maryland state trooper. But for the first four seconds of the encounter, it looks like a carjacking. Mr. Graber accepted a speeding ticket.

That was the end of the story until Mr. Graber posted video of the encounter on YouTube. Then six state troopers showed up with a search warrant, seized two computers, two laptops and a camera. The officers served the warrant at 6:45 a.m. on a weekday, detaining Mr. Graber's family for 90 minutes and forbidding his mother from leaving for work and his younger sister from going to school until the search was complete. Mr. Graber says he was shown a copy of a search warrant with a judge's signature on it but was only allowed to keep an unsigned copy — because the judge's identity is being kept secret.

Advertisement

Mr. Graber, who serves in the Air National Guard, was detained for 26 hours in the Baltimore County jail before seeing a judge to set his bond.

How is this possible? Because the Maryland wiretapping statute makes it a crime to record any conversation without the consent of all parties — a "unanimous consent" law. Maryland is one of a dozen states with such a statute; most jurisdictions are less strict. The penalty can be up to five years in prison and up to a $10,000 fine. When the prosecutor asked for a $15,000 bond for a $10,000 crime, the judge questioned both this maneuver and the use of the law against Mr. Graber.
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Another arrest, in Maryland.

Woman is arrested for recording deputy

Prosecutor to review case

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

By JOHN WHARTON

Staff writer

St. Mary's sheriff's deputies responding to a noise complaint last weekend at a Lexington Park neighborhood report that they seized a woman's cell phone and charged her with illegally recording a conversation.

Yvonne Nicole Shaw, 27, was taken to the St. Mary's jail after her arrest shortly after midnight Saturday at Colony Square, and a court commissioner ordered that she be released on personal recognizance.

Sheriff's Cpl. Patrick Handy wrote in a statement of probable cause that he was talking to people in the neighborhood when he and another deputy spotted Shaw standing about 12 feet away and holding her cell phone "in a manner suggesting she was recording our activity."

Handy seized the cell phone, reviewed its camcorder content and "could hear my voice and the voices of the other subjects I was talking to," the officer wrote in the charging papers, and he questioned Shaw.

"She did admit to recording our encounter on her cell phone," the corporal wrote, "for the purpose of trying to show the police are harassing people."

Shaw said Tuesday that she recorded the incident to show the conduct of the law officers.

"I honestly did not know that I was not able to do that," Shaw said. "He just snatched my phone from me and locked me up."

St. Mary's Sheriff Timothy K. Cameron ® said Monday that the case will be presented to county prosecutors.

"They're going to have to review the statement of charges and the officer's report to see whether they want to prosecute the case," the sheriff said.

A conviction for the felony offense of unlawful interception of communication carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

St. Mary's State's Attorney Richard D. Fritz ® said Tuesday that "one may not surreptitiously record another person," but that the law's nuances arose during an investigation of former President Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky, whose comments about the relationship were recorded by another woman, Linda Tripp. A charge against Tripp of violating the Maryland law was dismissed because that particular statute requires proof that the defendant knows the law.

"The person [making the recording] has to have a fair degree of knowledge that what they're doing is unlawful," Fritz said.

"Cell phones are so pervasive," the prosecutor said, "that recording something that occurs in public raises a question of whether or not it's unlawful. If I'm convinced this was a public encounter that just happened to be recorded, I probably will not proceed with the prosecution. The facts will probably bear out that it was not a private one-on-one conversation."
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Pretty sure this is not new in Massachusetts. I remember reading a case where a motorist recorded the audio of his traffic stop and was convicted under their wiretap laws.

 
Well guess which way your buddies Scalia, Roberts, Thomas etc are going to vote on this if it goes to the supreme court.

Actions have consequences. They can;t wait to get to this one I bet.

 
Massachusetts attorney June Jensen represented Simon Glik who was arrested for such a recording. She explained, "[T]he statute has been misconstrued by Boston police. You could go to the Boston Common and snap pictures and record if you want." Legal scholar and professor Jonathan Turley agrees, "The police are basing this claim on a ridiculous reading of the two-party consent surveillance law - requiring all parties to consent to being taped. I have written in the area of surveillance law and can say that this is utter nonsense."

The courts, however, disagree. A few weeks ago, an Illinois judge rejected a motion to dismiss an eavesdropping charge against Christopher Drew, who recorded his own arrest for selling one-dollar artwork on the streets of Chicago. Although the misdemeanor charges of not having a peddler's license and peddling in a prohibited area were dropped, Drew is being prosecuted for illegal recording, a Class I felony punishable by 4 to 15 years in prison.
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are there other examples of courts disagreeing? This one example is only that the court decided not to dismiss, which isn't nearly the same as saying that the courts disagree.If i'm the police, and i believe that my encounters are nearly always within guidelines, then i would welcome videotaping.

 
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Jackstraw said:
Well guess which way your buddies Scalia, Roberts, Thomas etc are going to vote on this if it goes to the supreme court. Actions have consequences. They can;t wait to get to this one I bet.
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Thomas: First amendment, first shmendment. The founders didn't mention cell phones in the constitution.
 
So, police officers are afforded more rights than we are in public, correct?

Otherwise, like others have stated...those dash mounted cameras and traffic cameras should also be considered illegal.

Unless it's the video portion only that flies...whereas audio makes it eavesdropping...this is just insane. Where the hell is the common sense in America anymore?

 
I am guessing most good cops want a video of their arrests. This makes it harder for defendants to lie. I am certain that these laws are authored to minimize lawsuits against city governments.

 
Good bump...completely missed this. Didn't know things had got this bad. Can't think of any justification for it.

 
While the officers in my county do amaze me sometimes with some of the authoratative things they do, I'm very proud to say the police agencies in my county will be mounting on-person cameras on their officers which will be discoverable to anyone as public record. I can't imagine a better way to show the truth and it's cool to see all sides working towards something which produces truth.

 
In case anyone is keeping score...

1) Cops can seize money you're carrying with you and force you to prove you earned it legally

2) You cannot record audio of your encounters with cops

3) Cops can use the excuse that they weren't trained properly to protect against liability for violations of rights

 
Zow said:
While the officers in my county do amaze me sometimes with some of the authoratative things they do, I'm very proud to say the police agencies in my county will be mounting on-person cameras on their officers which will be discoverable to anyone as public record. I can't imagine a better way to show the truth and it's cool to see all sides working towards something which produces truth.
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I'm actually surprised more counties don't do this. The perception that the police abuse their power clearly undermines the public's trust and respect for officers. Hiding behind skewed interpretations of eavesdropping laws only contribute to the public's mistrust (and outright fear of) law enforcement.
 
KnowledgeReignsSupreme said:
In case anyone is keeping score...

1) Cops can seize money you're carrying with you and force you to prove you earned it legally

2) You cannot record audio of your encounters with cops

3) Cops can use the excuse that they weren't trained properly to protect against liability for violations of rights
Click to expand...
Remember reading recently about horror stories of people having property seized and auctioned off without any charges being brought that the property was actually used criminally. Seizures & sales are just part of the police dept's budgets... they need a certain $ value each year taken from the citizenry to get by...

 
http://reason.com/archives/2010/06/29/police-blackout

Law enforcement agencies in Northern Virginia say you have no right to know what they’re doing.

Radley Balko from the July 2010 issue

Last November a police officer shot and killed David Masters, an unarmed motorist, as he sat in the driver’s seat of his car on the side of Richmond Highway, a major thoroughfare in Fairfax County, Virginia. Masters was wanted for allegedly stealing flowers from a planter. He had been given a ticket the day before for running a red light and then evading the police, though in a slow and not particularly dangerous manner.

In January of this year, Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney Raymond Morrogh announced through a press release that he would not be filing any charges against the officer who shot Masters. The shooting, Morrogh found, was justified due to a “furtive gesture” that suggested Masters had a weapon. The only eyewitness to this gesture was the police officer who pulled the trigger.

There exists dash-camera video of Masters’ shooting. There are also police interviews of other witnesses, and there is the police report itself. But the public and the press are unlikely to see those, or even to learn the officer’s name. That’s because the Fairfax County Police Department—along with the neighboring municipal police departments of Arlington and Alexandria—is among the most secretive, least transparent law enforcement agencies in the country.

Michael Pope, a reporter who covers Northern Virginia for the Connection Newspapers chain and for WAMU-FM, filed a series of open records requests related to the Masters shooting with the Fairfax County Police Department. All were denied. In March, Pope asked Fairfax County Police Public Information Officer Mary Ann Jennings why her department won’t at least release the incident report on Masters’ death, given the concerns that some have raised about the shooting. “Let us hear that concern,” Jennings shot back. “We are not hearing it from anybody except the media, except individual reporters.”

Except the media? That’s exactly who you would expect to file most open records requests. Asked why her department won’t even release the name of the officer who shot Masters, Jennings got more obtuse. “What does the name of an officer give the public in terms of information and disclosure?” Jennings asked. “I’d be curious to know why they want the name of an officer.”

Well, for starters, because he’s a government employee, paid by taxpayers and entrusted with the power to arrest, detain, coerce, and kill. And he recently used the most serious of those powers on an unarmed man. Releasing the name would allow reporters to see if the officer has been involved in other shootings or if there have been prior disciplinary measures or citizen complaints against him. It would allow the media to assess whether the Fairfax County Police Department has done an adequate job of training him in the use of lethal force.

Then again, journalists can’t get that other information either. The default position of the Fairfax County Police Department, Pope says, is to decline all requests for information. And not just from the media. When a member of the county SWAT team shot and killed 38-year-old optometrist Sal Culosi Jr. in 2006, it took nearly a year, plus legal action, to get the department to release information about its investigation of the shooting to Culosi’s family. Culosi, who had been suspected of wagering on football games with friends, was also unarmed when he was killed.

In a state that the professional journalism association Investigative Reporters and Editors ranks the fifth most transparent in the country, the police departments in Fairfax County, Arlington, and Alexandria have managed to interpret the open records law in a way that lets them be almost completely opaque. “Part of my daily routine when I worked in Florida was to drive to the police station and get a copy of the previous day’s incident reports,” Pope says. “I was just dumbfounded when I started working in Virginia.” The police rejected all his requests for information—even for incident reports about arrests the same department had described in press releases.

Invoking a phrase that traditionally refers to censorship, Fairfax County’s Jennings told Pope that releasing police reports to the press would have a “chilling effect” on victims and witnesses, discouraging them from coming forward to report crimes. As Pope notes, that doesn’t appear to be the case in cities that routinely release police reports, as nearly all do. When Pope asked Jennings what evidence she has to support her theory, she replied, “I don’t know if there’s evidence or not. All I have is what our investigators and what our commanders and the police administration believe.”

Don’t expect elected officials to correct any of this. “I am in the corner of trusting our police department,” Arlington County Board Member Barbara Favola told Pope. “If they push back I am not going to override them, and I don’t think I could get three votes on the board to override them either.”

Alexandria Commonwealth Attorney Randolph Sengel fired off an indignant letter to the editor after Pope wrote about the secrecy in the northern Virginia police departments. Calling Pope’s well-reported piece a “rant” that was “thinly disguised as a news story,” Sengel declared, “Law enforcement investigations and prosecutions are not carried out for the primary purpose of providing fodder for his paper.” Mocking the media’s role as a watchdog, Sengel added, “The sacred ‘right of the public to know’ is still (barely) governed by standards of reasonableness and civility,” as if those two adjectives were incompatible with a journalist inquiring about the details of a fatal police shooting of an unarmed man.

“The most offensive theme of this article,” Sengel complained, “is the notion that law enforcement agencies decline to release these reports to protect their own, or to conceal corrupt behavior.…Believe it or not, the reporter and his colleagues are not the last true guardians of truth and justice, the attainment of which does not hang on unfettered exercise of journalistic zeal. Last time I checked there were multiple safeguards in place to assure the integrity of the criminal justice system.”

These are remarkably wrongheaded sentiments, especially coming from an elected prosecutor. There have been several cases across the country where police reports haven’t jibed with video evidence or have otherwise turned out to be inaccurate. Journalists and advocacy groups have used public records to shed light on bogus arrests, police cover-ups, poor police training, and wrongful convictions. Sengel seems indignant at the very idea that a lowly journalist might be looking over his shoulder, or over the shoulders of the cops who bring him the people he prosecutes. Fairfax County hasn’t charged a police officer for an on-duty shooting in 70 years. Perhaps that’s because no officer there has deserved to be charged. But perhaps local police and prosecutors have too cozy a relationship. The point is, we don’t know. And northern Virginia’s cops have made it almost impossible to find out.
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videoguy505 said:
KnowledgeReignsSupreme said:
In case anyone is keeping score...

1) Cops can seize money you're carrying with you and force you to prove you earned it legally

2) You cannot record audio of your encounters with cops

3) Cops can use the excuse that they weren't trained properly to protect against liability for violations of rights
Click to expand...
Remember reading recently about horror stories of people having property seized and auctioned off without any charges being brought that the property was actually used criminally. Seizures & sales are just part of the police dept's budgets... they need a certain $ value each year taken from the citizenry to get by...
Click to expand...
I have been wondering if anyone had ever done a study on the estimated revenues that law enforcement makes via drug law property seizures. Seems like a pretty good racket.
 
KnowledgeReignsSupreme said:
videoguy505 said:
KnowledgeReignsSupreme said:
In case anyone is keeping score...

1) Cops can seize money you're carrying with you and force you to prove you earned it legally

2) You cannot record audio of your encounters with cops

3) Cops can use the excuse that they weren't trained properly to protect against liability for violations of rights
Click to expand...
Remember reading recently about horror stories of people having property seized and auctioned off without any charges being brought that the property was actually used criminally. Seizures & sales are just part of the police dept's budgets... they need a certain $ value each year taken from the citizenry to get by...
Click to expand...
I have been wondering if anyone had ever done a study on the estimated revenues that law enforcement makes via drug law property seizures. Seems like a pretty good racket.
Click to expand...
This guy says NPR totaled it at $1 billion in 2008.

Property forfeiture is a big money-maker for law enforcement, especially small-town departments. A 2008 National Public Radio report found that some Texas sheriffs depend on seized assets for up to one-third of their departments' budgets, and nationwide, in 2008, properties valued at over $1 billion were seized by police and then made available for use by police departments nationwide.
Click to expand...
 
Welcome to the police state...just wait until the cameras are everywhere, pointed at you, issuing automatic fines, and with all recordings sealed off from public view. All in the interest of safety or anti terrorism or some other lousy excuse.

 
videoguy505 said:
http://reason.com/archives/2010/06/29/police-blackout

Law enforcement agencies in Northern Virginia say you have no right to know what they’re doing.

Radley Balko from the July 2010 issue

Last November a police officer shot and killed David Masters, an unarmed motorist, as he sat in the driver’s seat of his car on the side of Richmond Highway, a major thoroughfare in Fairfax County, Virginia. Masters was wanted for allegedly stealing flowers from a planter. He had been given a ticket the day before for running a red light and then evading the police, though in a slow and not particularly dangerous manner.

In January of this year, Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney Raymond Morrogh announced through a press release that he would not be filing any charges against the officer who shot Masters. The shooting, Morrogh found, was justified due to a “furtive gesture” that suggested Masters had a weapon. The only eyewitness to this gesture was the police officer who pulled the trigger.

There exists dash-camera video of Masters’ shooting. There are also police interviews of other witnesses, and there is the police report itself. But the public and the press are unlikely to see those, or even to learn the officer’s name. That’s because the Fairfax County Police Department—along with the neighboring municipal police departments of Arlington and Alexandria—is among the most secretive, least transparent law enforcement agencies in the country.

Michael Pope, a reporter who covers Northern Virginia for the Connection Newspapers chain and for WAMU-FM, filed a series of open records requests related to the Masters shooting with the Fairfax County Police Department. All were denied. In March, Pope asked Fairfax County Police Public Information Officer Mary Ann Jennings why her department won’t at least release the incident report on Masters’ death, given the concerns that some have raised about the shooting. “Let us hear that concern,” Jennings shot back. “We are not hearing it from anybody except the media, except individual reporters.”

Except the media? That’s exactly who you would expect to file most open records requests. Asked why her department won’t even release the name of the officer who shot Masters, Jennings got more obtuse. “What does the name of an officer give the public in terms of information and disclosure?” Jennings asked. “I’d be curious to know why they want the name of an officer.”

Well, for starters, because he’s a government employee, paid by taxpayers and entrusted with the power to arrest, detain, coerce, and kill. And he recently used the most serious of those powers on an unarmed man. Releasing the name would allow reporters to see if the officer has been involved in other shootings or if there have been prior disciplinary measures or citizen complaints against him. It would allow the media to assess whether the Fairfax County Police Department has done an adequate job of training him in the use of lethal force.

Then again, journalists can’t get that other information either. The default position of the Fairfax County Police Department, Pope says, is to decline all requests for information. And not just from the media. When a member of the county SWAT team shot and killed 38-year-old optometrist Sal Culosi Jr. in 2006, it took nearly a year, plus legal action, to get the department to release information about its investigation of the shooting to Culosi’s family. Culosi, who had been suspected of wagering on football games with friends, was also unarmed when he was killed.

In a state that the professional journalism association Investigative Reporters and Editors ranks the fifth most transparent in the country, the police departments in Fairfax County, Arlington, and Alexandria have managed to interpret the open records law in a way that lets them be almost completely opaque. “Part of my daily routine when I worked in Florida was to drive to the police station and get a copy of the previous day’s incident reports,” Pope says. “I was just dumbfounded when I started working in Virginia.” The police rejected all his requests for information—even for incident reports about arrests the same department had described in press releases.

Invoking a phrase that traditionally refers to censorship, Fairfax County’s Jennings told Pope that releasing police reports to the press would have a “chilling effect” on victims and witnesses, discouraging them from coming forward to report crimes. As Pope notes, that doesn’t appear to be the case in cities that routinely release police reports, as nearly all do. When Pope asked Jennings what evidence she has to support her theory, she replied, “I don’t know if there’s evidence or not. All I have is what our investigators and what our commanders and the police administration believe.”

Don’t expect elected officials to correct any of this. “I am in the corner of trusting our police department,” Arlington County Board Member Barbara Favola told Pope. “If they push back I am not going to override them, and I don’t think I could get three votes on the board to override them either.”

Alexandria Commonwealth Attorney Randolph Sengel fired off an indignant letter to the editor after Pope wrote about the secrecy in the northern Virginia police departments. Calling Pope’s well-reported piece a “rant” that was “thinly disguised as a news story,” Sengel declared, “Law enforcement investigations and prosecutions are not carried out for the primary purpose of providing fodder for his paper.” Mocking the media’s role as a watchdog, Sengel added, “The sacred ‘right of the public to know’ is still (barely) governed by standards of reasonableness and civility,” as if those two adjectives were incompatible with a journalist inquiring about the details of a fatal police shooting of an unarmed man.

“The most offensive theme of this article,” Sengel complained, “is the notion that law enforcement agencies decline to release these reports to protect their own, or to conceal corrupt behavior.…Believe it or not, the reporter and his colleagues are not the last true guardians of truth and justice, the attainment of which does not hang on unfettered exercise of journalistic zeal. Last time I checked there were multiple safeguards in place to assure the integrity of the criminal justice system.”

These are remarkably wrongheaded sentiments, especially coming from an elected prosecutor. There have been several cases across the country where police reports haven’t jibed with video evidence or have otherwise turned out to be inaccurate. Journalists and advocacy groups have used public records to shed light on bogus arrests, police cover-ups, poor police training, and wrongful convictions. Sengel seems indignant at the very idea that a lowly journalist might be looking over his shoulder, or over the shoulders of the cops who bring him the people he prosecutes. Fairfax County hasn’t charged a police officer for an on-duty shooting in 70 years. Perhaps that’s because no officer there has deserved to be charged. But perhaps local police and prosecutors have too cozy a relationship. The point is, we don’t know. And northern Virginia’s cops have made it almost impossible to find out.
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He needs to make a FOIA request.
 
videoguy505 said:
KnowledgeReignsSupreme said:
videoguy505 said:
KnowledgeReignsSupreme said:
In case anyone is keeping score...

1) Cops can seize money you're carrying with you and force you to prove you earned it legally

2) You cannot record audio of your encounters with cops

3) Cops can use the excuse that they weren't trained properly to protect against liability for violations of rights
Click to expand...
Remember reading recently about horror stories of people having property seized and auctioned off without any charges being brought that the property was actually used criminally. Seizures & sales are just part of the police dept's budgets... they need a certain $ value each year taken from the citizenry to get by...
Click to expand...
I have been wondering if anyone had ever done a study on the estimated revenues that law enforcement makes via drug law property seizures. Seems like a pretty good racket.
Click to expand...
This guy says NPR totaled it at $1 billion in 2008.

Property forfeiture is a big money-maker for law enforcement, especially small-town departments. A 2008 National Public Radio report found that some Texas sheriffs depend on seized assets for up to one-third of their departments' budgets, and nationwide, in 2008, properties valued at over $1 billion were seized by police and then made available for use by police departments nationwide.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Wow, had no idea it was close to that much. In my county I swear the tow companies are in the cops' pockets. I get so many bogus driving on suspended license's cases where we can easily get them dismissed, but people are still stick with monster tow and storage fees with no cheap/freepractical recourse .

 
http://carlosmiller.com/2010/07/16/breakin...videotape-cops/

We'll have to see where this goes...

Congressman introduces resolution to protect citizens who videotape cops

July 16th, 2010

By Carlos Miller

A U.S. Congressman has introduced a resolution that would protect citizens who videotape cops in public from getting arrested on state wiretapping charges.

Edolphus Towns, a Democrat from New York, introduced the resolution on Thursday, the same day USA Today wrote a scathing editorial denouncing these types of arrests.

These types of arrests have become an epidemic throughout the country as more people are carrying some type of video-recording device on them at all times.

But the case that has gained the most national attention has been the arrest of Anthony Graber, a National Guardsman who is facing 16 years in prison because he uploaded a video of a Maryland State Trooper pulling a gun on him during a traffic stop.

H. Con. Res 298 states the following:

Expressing the sense of Congress that the videotaping or photographing of police engaged in potentially abusive activity in a public place should not be prosecuted in State or Federal courts.

Whereas prosecutors in several States are applying State wiretapping laws in the prosecution of individuals for the videotaping of police engaged in potentially abusive activity;

Whereas State and Federal wiretapping laws were not intended to be used for such charges;

Whereas some police departments have been using national security as a justification for the harassment, charges, or an arrest of individuals, based solely on a citizen recording, with no additional factors considered;

Whereas a study conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2000 indicated that 22 percent of police officers claim their fellow officers sometimes, often, or always use excessive force; and

Whereas the privacy and safety rights of the police officers in the line of duty must be balanced carefully with the public’s right to transparency and accountability of public servants: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That it is the sense of Congress that–

(1) citizen recording fills in gaps in existing checks against law enforcement abuses, when balanced with the needs of law enforcement, police privacy, and citizen privacy;

(2) national security alone is insufficient justification for harassment, charges, or an arrest for otherwise innocent behavior, such as videotaping; and

(3) members of the public have a right to observe, and if they choose, to make video or sound recordings of the police during the discharge of their public duties, as long as they do not physically or otherwise interfere with the officers’ discharge of their duties, or violate any other State or Federal law, intended to protect the safety of police officers, in the process of the recording.
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The Washington Post, NPR Talk of the Nation and Gizmodo also reported on these types of arrests in the weeks leading to the proposed resolution with the Washington Post taking a strong stance against these arrests in an editorial.

Today, the Cato Institute, one of the most influential think tanks in the world, also reported on the issue as well as the Tucson Citizen (where I got my start in newspapers back in the ’90s).

These arrests tend to take place in states that have two-party consent laws regarding the electronic recording of conversations. These illegal wiretapping laws were created to protect people from having their phone conversations recorded, which is normally a situation where one would have an expectation of privacy.

However, police have twisted the law in their favor to arrest people who are videotaping them in public – where nobody has an expectation of privacy.

* In South Florida, a mother who was arrested last year for videotaping police arresting her son filed a lawsuit against the Boynton Beach Police Department this month.

* In Oregon, a police chief vowed that these types of arrest would continue even after his city had to dish out a $19,000 settlement and the city attorney sent out a memo stating that these arrests were not legal.

* In Massachusetts, a pair of activists were arrested this month for openly videotaping cops in public, even after they had received permission from another law enforcement officer to videotape.

* In Maryland, where one prosecutor is threatening to send Graber, the motorcyclist, to prison for 16 years in prison, a prosecutor in another county has a completely different interpretation of the law and has refused to prosecute a citizen who arrested on these same charges after she videotaped cops in public.
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videoguy505 said:
videoguy505 said:
Zow said:
videoguy505 said:
Fairfax County Commonwealth
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He needs to make a FOIA request.
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FOIA
Freedom of Information Actprovides that any person has a right, enforceable in court, to obtain access to federal agency records
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It surprises me more and more every day you passed the bar.
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Yup, even moreso today than ever before.
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Most states have mirroring state statutes to FOIA. I wasn't about to post every one of them.
 
Zow said:
videoguy505 said:
videoguy505 said:
Zow said:
He needs to make a FOIA request.
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It surprises me more and more every day you passed the bar.
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Yup, even moreso today than ever before.
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Most states have mirroring state statutes to FOIA. I wasn't about to post every one of them.
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:moneybag:I bolded the following phrase in the article:
filed a series of open records requests related to the Masters shooting with the Fairfax County Police Department. All were denied.
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You replied he should use FOIA.Seems he exhausted the applicable local & state avenues, and it seems to me you didn't know FOIA was federal. :rant:
 
Good news on this topic. DoJ issues statement supporting the rights of citizens. I'm tempted to keep a copy of the full statement in my camera bag just in case. :pics: :thumbup:

U.S. Department of Justice Slaps Baltimore Police Over Right to Record Issue

The U.S. Department of Justice is coming down hard on the Baltimore Police Department as it prepares to issue a settlement to a man whose footage they deleted after he recorded them making an arrest.

The settlement stems from a 2010 incident at the Preakness Stakes, which prompted the Department of Justice in January to send a statement of interest to the judge presiding over the resulting civil suit, advising him that such blatant action violates the Constitution and should not be tolerated.

That letter provoked the police department into issuing a 7-page General Order to its officers February stating that citizens have the “absolute right” to record cops in public as long as they did not "violate any section of any law, ordinance, code or criminal article."

Baltimore cops simply expanded existing laws to allow them to continue cracking down on camera-wielding citizens, including threatening to arrest a man for loitering.

On Monday, the Department of Justice slapped the Baltimore Police Department with another letter, condemning it for writing such a vague general order and for allowing the harassment to continue.

It is a very impressive read. Eleven pages of case citations and Constitutional clarifications. One of the most solid efforts from the federal government in protecting the rights of citizens to record police.

The letter was issued less than 10 days after various journalism and civil rights organizations, including my favorite, the National Press Photographers Association, sent U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder a letter, insisting he take action in the War on Photography.

As far as I know, this is the first time the federal government has drafted guidelines to a local police department on this issue. The most extensive out of all the general orders I’ve read from police departments over the years.

And it will be the biggest challenge for whoever replaces Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III who abruptly resigned earlier this month, staying in the job only until August.

I would love to break the letter down for you, but I’m still digesting it and it’s late. Or early depending on how much sleep you’ve had.

So maybe you guys can help me out by copying and pasting the positives and negatives you find in the letter.

Here’s a portion I know you guys are going to love:



“Members of the press and members of the general public enjoy the same rights in any area accessible to the general public.” Id. at 4.

“No individual is required to display ‘press credentials’ in order to exercise his/her right to observe, photograph, or video record police activity taking place in an area accessible to, or within view of, the general public.” Id

Here's another good one:



Because recording police officers in the public discharge of their duties is protected by the First Amendment, policies should prohibit interference with recording of police activities except in narrowly circumscribed situations. More particularly, policies should instruct officers that, except under limited circumstances, officers must not search or seize a camera or recording device without a warrant. In addition, policies should prohibit more subtle actions that may nonetheless infringe upon individuals’ First Amendment rights. Officers should be advised not to threaten, intimidate, or otherwise discourage an individual from recording police officer enforcement activities or intentionally block or obstruct cameras or recording devices.

Policies should prohibit officers from destroying recording devices or cameras and deleting recordings or photographs under any circumstances. In addition to violating the First Amendment, police officers violate the core requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment procedural due process clause when they irrevocably deprived individuals of their recordings without first providing notice and an opportunity to object. See Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U.S. 319, 333 (1976) (“The right to be heard before being condemned to suffer grievous loss of any kind . . . is a principle basic to our society.”); Stotter v. Univ. of Tex. at San Antonio, 508 F.3d 812, 823 (5th Cir. 2007) (The notice defendant provided to the plaintiff “was insufficient to satisfy due process because [plaintiff] did not receive the notice until after his personal property was allegedly discarded . . . . [D]iscarding [plaintiff’s] personal property in this manner violated his procedural due process rights.”).

Here’s another one I enjoyed:

This principal is particularly important in the current age where widespread access to recording devices and online media have provided private individuals with the capacity to gather and disseminate newsworthy information with an ease that rivals that of the traditional news media. See Glik, 655 F.3d at 84 (“[M]any of our images of current events come from bystanders with a ready cell phone or digital camera rather than a traditional film crew, and news stories are now just as likely to be broken by a blogger at her computer as a reporter at a major newspaper.”).

And that last sentence couldn’t ring truer this early morning as not a single news outlet has this story yet.

Click here to read the letter.
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