Arizona Makes It Illegal To Record Cops From Less Than Eight Feet Away

Free Speech

from the is-that-8-cop-feet-or-8-civilian-feet? dept

Courts (with the rare exception) are in agreement: there’s a First Amendment right to film cops. With every citizen carrying a camera these days, there’s a lot more filming happening. And those recordings have often proven key when cops face criminal charges for violating rights or, you know, murdering people.

It’s little wonder cops aren’t thrilled about the recordings they can’t control. But that should be a cop problem that goes unresolved in the interest of improving accountability. Instead, the desire to curtail recordings by citizens has been taken up by legislators, who have created legislation that would criminalize this First Amendment activity if it takes place too close to cops.

One of the first such efforts was crafted by a Texas state representative, who wanted to create a 25-foot “no recording” halo around officers, ensuring the only “legal” recordings would be too far away from the action to undercut the police narrative.

Arizona legislators seem inordinately focused on violating First Amendment rights. A year after the Texas effort, a state legislator introduced a bill creating a 20-foot limit on recordings of police officers. The 2016 effort went nowhere, which should have discouraged legislators from introducing similarly stupid bills.

Instead, this encouraged state legislators. Following months of protests against police violence and the lack of accountability that allowed this violence to flourish, the same state rep (John Kavanaugh) who introduced the 2016 bill decided to try again. The only change was the length of the no recording distance, shrinking it from 20 feet to a mere 8 feet.

Because Arizona is a ass, the bill has received the governor’s approval and become law, as Lindsey Bever reports for the Washington Post.

A new Arizona law will make it illegal to film law enforcement encounters from closer than 8 feet away except in certain circumstances, such as when the person recording is the one being questioned by the authorities.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) signed the bill into law on Wednesday, which will make it a misdemeanor offense to record police activity at close range after officers have issued a verbal warning.

Apparently not satisfied with talking sympathetic legislators into passing this constitutional mess of a bill, Rep. Kavanaugh also talked AZ Central into posting his op-ed in support of his own legislation back in March, where he made some truly ridiculous supporting statements.

Opponents of the bill also claim that the videotaping of some recent high-profile police use of force incidents would not be possible under my bill. They are incorrect.

The first citizen video to expose police brutality was the Rodney King video, which was filmed from more than 100 feet away and still picked up details sufficient to be useful in court. In the more recent incident involving Freddie Gray, the video camera is clearly 8 to 10 feet away from Mr. Gray and might even be farther away because the photographer could have been using the phone’s zoom setting.

Finally, the argument that filming from 8 feet away does not allow for a proper view of the scene is ridiculous.

Good lord. What an argument. The Rodney King beating may have been caught on tape but all officers involved in the beating were acquitted. Not exactly the sort of thing that says accountability can be had if people are forced to record from a certain distance away. The Freddie Gray example is even worse, as charges against five of the six officers failed to result in a conviction. The sixth officer’s court case ended in a mistrial.

The op-ed makes it clear Kavanaugh’s real aim to hinder police accountability activists.

I agreed to run this bill because there are groups hostile to the police that follow them around to videotape police incidents, and they get dangerously close to potentially violent encounters. The Tucson police officers who asked me to run this bill said that in their area some of these people videotape from 1 to 2 feet behind them, even when they’re arresting people.

People who come this close to police officers generally don’t do it during arrests or violent interactions. But they often are confrontational when speaking to officers, whether they approach officers or the officers approach them. Many engage in what they refer to as “First Amendment audits,” seeing what the officers’ reactions are to being filmed by critics standing mere feet from them.

This is an important thing to do. Any cop can respect rights when it’s easy to do so. People standing several feet away passively recording are rarely harassed. It’s when it’s difficult to respect rights that officers tend to start violating them. Creating an 8-foot space simply makes it easier for cops to respect rights because it doesn’t challenge their ability to do so under (mild) duress.

The problem with this law is the cops get to decide what 8 feet is. And they can turn legal recordings into illegal recordings by approaching the people filming them. Sure, the recorded evidence might get a few bogus charges tossed, but the overall effect will be to chill protected speech by letting citizens know their First Amendment rights are only valid until a cop says otherwise.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, arizona, john kavanaugh, recording police