Florida Legislators Push Bills Aimed At Making It More Difficult To Film Cops

Free Speech

from the who-decides-what-14-feet-actually-is dept

A number of stupid lawmakers have attempted to basically outlaw filming cops by proposing imaginative legislation that would prevent all but the most ineffective documentation of public employees performing their public duties.

You can’t outlaw filming police. The First Amendment pretty much prevents that, even if case law in judicial circuits is still not completely settled. What you can do is create new offenses that give officers a reason to arrest people for filming then, including people wandering within a circumference that’s wholly defined by the officer enforcing it.

So far, it’s only the state of Arizona that has managed to outlaw recording of cops, as long as the recording isn’t far enough away from the scene of the action. Other states have tried (Texas said 25 feet before shrinking it to 20 feet, which was then followed by an abandonment of this effort) but Florida legislators seem intent on limiting outside documentation of police activities.

This opinion piece published at Yahoo attacks the law, but it unfortunately opens with a poorly worded paragraph that might muddle the issue before anyone can get to the rest of the piece. It calls it this effort “witness intimidation legislation,” a term that suggests the state wants to limit witness intimidation when, in fact, it’s actually trying to intimidate witnesses of police misconduct.

This is more to the point:

If passed, this legislation would allow police officers greater authority to harass and criminalize people for documenting their use of excessive force. It would make it illegal to approach within 20 feet of a police officer (and, in the case of the Senate bill, other first responders) effectively criminalizing, with fines and jail time, the filming of police at close proximity.

All of this is true. The state Senate version makes it illegal to approach any “first responder” within 14 feet with the intent to “impede, provoke, or harass.” The House version is pretty much the same thing, but with a 20-foot radius. Both define harassment as any act that “causes emotional distress” and “serves no legitimate purpose.” That last stipulation might prove handy in court. Many courts consider filming police officers to be a legitimate act of public service and preemptively covered by the First Amendment.

Both versions are equally terrible in other ways. They both criminalize the production of sound — the criminality of which will apparently be left up to the discretion of the police officer at the scene.

Harass the first responder or make so much noise that a first responder is prevented from performing their official duties or providing medical aid.

I have yet to hear any first responder (referring only to EMS units and/or firefighters) being so deterred by bystanders’ noise they could not do their jobs. In fact, I’ve never heard about any first responder being sued by someone for violating their First Amendment rights by preventing them from recording the incident and/or being too close to the action. Almost everyone understands first responders of this sort are there to save lives and prevent/limit injury. They give them their space and respect their requests to give them more space.

That’s one of several reasons this legislation is bullshit. It tries to treat cops as first responders when first responders are always there to save lives, rather than harm them. First responders don’t mind being filmed because they’re generally engaged in actually heroic acts.

Cops, on the other hand, wander into bad situations and make them worse. They aren’t there to save lives. Even when they’re specifically asked to save lives, they often prefer to take them. That’s why cops don’t want to be filmed and that’s why shitty legislators are writing shitty legislation and pushing it through the legislature by pretending people are routinely harassing actual heroes, rather than just bad cops doing bad things.

These are proposals solely meant to push people bringing accountability to cops further back. This gives cops a reason to arrest people for filming them. This is an attempt to codify an imaginary radius, where 14-20 feet will be whatever a cop needs it to be when too many citizens are doing too much filming. Laws like these were never proposed before every citizen started carrying a camera in their pocket. Now, with most of the population wielding smartphones, suddenly laws like these are “needed” to protect insanely powerful public employees from the people they serve. It’s bullshit. And hopefully both of these proposals will die under the weight of their own pretenses before reaching the governor’s desk.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, filming police, florida, harassment, transparency