As Scrutiny Of Law Enforcement Increases, Legislators Are Trying To Criminalize Filming Of Police Officers
from the public-servants-are-deciding-'service'-means-'fucking-the-public' dept
It appears several legislators haven’t learned anything from the months of anti-police violence protests that spread across the nation in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin.
What should have provoked a reassessment of law enforcement’s contribution to society, and a closer examination of their means and methods, has instead generated a super-perverse form of backlash that has seen certain legislators circle the lawmaking wagons in hopes of shielding already very powerful people from additional scrutiny.
There’s a good chance Officer Chauvin would never have been convicted if his actions hadn’t been recorded by a resident at the scene of what’s generously referred to as an “arrest.” Without this recording, the public would have been left with the Minneapolis PD’s narrative, which stated only that George Floyd had “died” following a “medical incident” during a “police interaction.” What actually happened was never acknowledged in the MPD’s press release: Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes… and for three minutes after another officer informed Chauvin he could no longer detect Floyd’s pulse.
The answer to this problem is more scrutiny and more recordings of police officers performing their public duties. Pretty much everywhere in the nation this activity is considered protected First Amendment activity. But some legislators believe more opacity is the answer and are trying to criminalize the act of recording officers.
We’ve already covered one such effort. Arizona Republicans are trying to pass a bill that would make it illegal to record officers from less than eight feet away. Not discussed is how officers are supposed to accurately gauge this distance. Also not discussed is what happens if an officer closes the gap, turning a legal activity into a suddenly-illegal one.
Unfortunately, this isn’t an anomaly, as Trone Dowd reports for Vice News. More legislators are working hard to punch holes in this Constitutionally-protected act.
While Arizona is still grappling with passing its proposal, laws that could threaten the right to film the police have passed in other states. As of last April, Oklahoma has an “anti-doxing” law to prevent an officer’s personal information, which could include video badge numbers, patrol car license plates, and other identifiable information, from being released to the public.
So, you can film cops in Oklahoma. You just have to ensure you don’t release any information anyone else at the same incident can see clearly, like badge numbers and license plates. According to the bill’s author, identifying information simply isn’t protected. According to state Senator Dan Bullard, “there’s no reason to get up close to a vehicle or up to the officer.”
A similar “anti-doxing” provision is now up for debate in Florida — an expansion of the state’s already terrible anti-rioting law.
Florida state Rep. Juan Fernandez-Barquin, the Republican author of Florida’s HB1 anti-riot bill, had a similar motivation for the “cyber intimidation by publication” portion of his bill.
“‘Harass’ has a specific definition that requires the person’s actions to serve no legitimate purpose,” he told VICE News.“To violate the law, a person’s threat or harassment must put the victim in reasonable fear of bodily harm—not just annoy the person. This statute is narrowly tailored to prevent individuals with bad motives from ‘doxing’ someone.”
If you don’t like the public to identify you while you perform public duties, maybe you should exit the public sector. Plenty of other public servants work in offices or at desks that have their name and position on them. Vehicles on public streets have no expectation of privacy, which has allowed law enforcement agencies to collects billions of license plate/location records. Only someone interested in shielding officers from the consequences of their actions would argue the capturing of badge numbers and cop car license plates is dangerous and a potential violation of their (nonexistent) privacy.
This is obviously a whole new level of legislative bullshit. It has nothing to do with officer safety and everything to do with protecting them from accountability. The incidental capture of information these bills and laws say is off-limits will deter recordings and give vengeful cops and prosecutors an easy way to punish people for daring to aim cameras at cops.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, civil rights, recording police, transparency
Comments on “As Scrutiny Of Law Enforcement Increases, Legislators Are Trying To Criminalize Filming Of Police Officers”
Solving the wrong problem
It appears several legislators haven’t learned anything from the months of anti-police violence protests that spread across the nation in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin.
Unfortunately they did learn from that event…
There’s a good chance Officer Chauvin would never have been convicted if his actions hadn’t been recorded by a resident at the scene of what’s generously referred to as an “arrest.” Without this recording, the public would have been left with the Minneapolis PD’s narrative, which stated only that George Floyd had “died” following a “medical incident” during a “police interaction.”
… the problem is the lesson they seem to have taken away from ‘cop murders someone while other cops look on, recording of murder goes public and cop is convicted of murder’ is that they need to prevent another such recording from being made so as to ‘protect’ police from any consequences for their actions.
Presented with the problem of killer cops and a rightly infuriated public they’ve apparently decided that the proper solution is to keep the public in the dark and keep any ‘inconvenient’ videos from being made that might contradict the police narrative of why another person dropped dead around them, a tactic which to put it mildly is probably not going to help the schism between the public and police or convince the public that those in power give a damn about killer cops.
The "Party of Small Government"
Once again, the “party of small government” does everything it can to ensure that government agents have total freedom from accountability and oversight.
““cyber intimidation by publication””
Yes because cyber intimidation is so much worse than unhinged cops murdering people or violating their oath of office, when even if there is video showing the whole incident you cocknobblers STILL try to find way to make the execution of an innocent person okay.
Cops are murdering people & the response is to make it a crime to record that crime in progress.
Corrupt system is corrupt.
Re:
I’m sure they’ll be super-duper quick to charge any police that say publish the name of an accused criminal in order to smear their reputation and make their death from interacting with police justified, I mean if publishing someone’s personal details in order to make them look bad is unacceptable when it’s a cop’s personal information then surely it’s just as bad when they do it to others…
Re: Re:
Didn’t you know??
Our betters have their own law which look nothing like the ones they expect us to follow.
Oh they did learn. They learned that police officers need to be protected from ANY kind of filming so they cannot be held liable for their actions.
Hey, lets have our elected representatives have similar protection. But lets do it by having them wear white coverings over their head/face when ever they are in danger of being seen the the public. Oh and they should probably move their meetings to night time. Make it harder to be recorded clearly. After all we would not want them to be less safe than the people they are making laws to protect.
Oh wait…. I think that sounds familiar…
/s
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You forgot to say that in order to demonstrate their faith the meetings will be illuminated by the light of a burning cross /s
great idea? NOT
I find it strange that the first thing everyone thinks about is to take Guns from the Citizens.
But if you take them from the cops, and then tell anyone that shoots at them will be arrested and In jail ALONG time. The odds are less would be shot at.
The part about cops killing people is that Many of these happening are with Non-Violent criminals.
Even in the past, Cop mistakes Gun as tazer, and SHOOTS kid in back of head? Why were you aiming at the back of head?
Loved the idea years ago, that we Put camera’s on police and Police agencies, it would make great movies. THEN release all of it to public domain, AS IT IS PUBLIC DOMAIN.
We have camera’s in courts, we have camera’s everywhere Except where it could SAVE a CITY from LAW SUITS.
Yes, but citizens must have no expectation of privacy when they go out in public.
Ummm...
Ummm… Isn’t that more-or-less what police badge numbers and license plates are for in the first place? Did someone change the definition of ‘doxing’ while I was waiting in line to renew my drivers license?
Re:
Oh no no no, you see that information is for police use only so they know who to put on paid leave until the heat dies down, it was never meant to be used against them by allowing the public to identify individual officers acting poorly and thereby making it harder for the department to water accusations down by not naming specific officers.
(I’d put a sarc tag after that but given they made it a crime to accurately identify cops I suspect it’s far closer to the truth than not.)
Seriously
I get outlawing putting personal information out there like DOB, personal phone numbers, addresses, etc. there should be some Privacy protections consistent with what the rest of the population expects.
But if you literally wear it on your chest, it’s free game. If you can see it while standing on the street there is zero expectation of privacy.
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I wonder what the penalty will be for cops who manage to release the “suspect” (read victim) entire history of interactions with the law long before they even admit an officer was there.
There are two classes of people:
Legislators and their rich owners fall firmly in group 1, which is why this is happening.
“If you don’t like the public to identify you while you perform public duties, maybe you should exit the public sector”
Yep. Most people who work in retail have to submit to the fact that they’re being filmed almost constantly, and if there’s an incident that requires the footage to be release publicly during the investigation of a crime then they will be identifiable as a result within that footage.
I’m yet to hear a good argument as to why people who are entrusted by the public to carry out functions that can potentially lead to destructive damage to person or property should not be held to the same standard as someone who works in Wal Mart or fast food.
Re:
Image in the collection…
‘How do Trader Joe’s employees have more patience than cops?’
“Because we’ll actually lose our jobs”