Another Settlement Shows Why It’s A Bad Idea For Cops To Harass People Who Film Them
from the you're-only-hurting-the-communities-you-pretend-to-serve dept
We may not have Supreme Court precedent (yet!), but a number of cases handled by appellate circuits all over the nation have made it resoundingly clear: there’s a First Amendment right to film police officers.
Of course, lawmakers caping for cops have done their best to make this act more difficult. Multiple attempts have been made to create a protective area around cops (the bigger the better!) that would make it more difficult to film police, as well as give cops an excuse to arrest anyone in the area attempting to record them. Most of those efforts have failed, either because they’ve been voted down or they’ve been rejected by courts as unconstitutional.
Cops have also used wiretapping statutes to make bullshit arrests of people who record them. A lot of those efforts have been undone by federal court decisions upholding the right to record officers, even in states where recordings are subject to two-party consent laws.
Meanwhile, down in the Fifth Circuit (where cops are treated better than in other circuits), a settlement has been paid out to the teen who recorded his mother’s arrest by St. Tammany Parish (LA) deputies four years ago.
A teenager who video-recorded his mother’s forceful arrest by Louisiana sheriff’s deputies in 2020 has been awarded $185,000 by a federal jury in a lawsuit filed over one deputy’s attempt to interfere with the recording.
De’Shaun Johnson was 14 when deputies arrived at his family’s home in St. Tammany Parish to question his mother, Teliah Perkins, about allegations she had ridden a motorcycle without a helmet — a charge her attorneys said was baseless and that was never prosecuted.
The confrontation turned physical, and video showed the woman being forced to the ground.
That wasn’t the only confrontation that turned physical. As Johnson attempted to record this arrest occurring in his own home, he was accosted by a deputy far more concerned with the teen’s cell phone than the arrest still underway behind him.
As Mr. Johnson started to record the incident on his phone, Deputy Moring stepped in front of him to prevent him from capturing the incident. Moring shoved Mr. Johnson in the chest and aimed his Taser directly at him. When Mr. Johnson objected, saying, “You can’t Tase a child,” Deputy Moring responded: “Watch me.”
Since the incident, Mr. Johnson was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and received treatment as a result.
Lovely. I guess it was worth it. After all, the parish residents will be paying this bill and Deputy Moring still got to threaten a non-threatening teen with a Taser. It works out for everyone!
The remarkable thing is this settlement still happened despite the Fifth Circuit granting immunity on the excessive force claims brought by the teen’s mother. It did, however, rule that the teen’s claims against Deputy Moring could proceed. The case proceeded to trial and jury decided a rights violation did occur and it was worth slightly under $200,000.
Of course, this being the Fifth Circuit, at least one judge had stupid things to say about civil rights and cops. This time it was Judge James Ho, who has demonstrated multiple times he believes the government should have more rights than the governed.
Ho dissented from the part of the Nov. 30 decision allowing action against Moring to continue over his attempt to stop the filming of the arrest. “The Constitution does not compel police officers to affirmatively help a citizen secure the ideal camera angle while that citizen is actively berating the police just a few feet away from an active physical struggle with another person,” Ho wrote.
Yeah. That’s why the Fifth is the mess it is. Too many judges like Ho, too few like Judge Don Willett. In other words, cops should be able to “affirmatively” threaten someone with a Taser if they don’t stop filming because heavily armed officers with the force of law behind them shouldn’t have to deal with the immense burden of being “actively berated” while performing an arrest.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, 5th circuit, filming arrests, filming police, louisiana
Comments on “Another Settlement Shows Why It’s A Bad Idea For Cops To Harass People Who Film Them”
Ah yes. Beating kids. Why is it that those who support cops and cops always seem to be the worst people.
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Perhaps because working against (and then, inevitably, with) the worst the citizenry has to offer wears you down. And the people in charge of the cops (including, ultimately, us) have no good idea how to correct the culture effectively.
What, you object to me including you – and me – in that us? How about you show me how your plans have played out? And how you secured funding for them?
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Cute victim-blaming. The common people have little to no influence over policing practices, regardless of how they might vote.
Wait, so common people are in charge of the cops, but if they don’t have a pithy solution and funding ready for your personal approval, they have no right to complain?
Lick a boot somewhere else.
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Ah such a great argument. Seeing bad acts, cops are forced to themselves carry out those acts on innocents. Which makes cops worse than the worst since they do it fully aware of how wrong their actions are.
It’s pretty simple. You simply enforce the law on criminals, aka cops, like the everyone else.
As for funding. No money for weapons, spying, AI, or other tech to harass people with. The rest can come by fining cops for their behavior.
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What I’m hearing is that police should be regularly given psych evals by third-party testers and given the boot the second they start showing questionable ethics and/or thinking patterns, and that even those that pass shouldn’t be allowed to stick with the profession for any significant amount of time, turning it into a short, ‘for a few years’ job rather than one that a person could ever expect to hold until retirement.
Those sound like good ideas to me so well done.
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In reality—I’m not making this up—when police departments have evaluated the ability of cops to think, it was to weed out the ones who thought too much. Applicants are sometimes rejected for scoring too high on I.Q. tests.
Be careful what you wish for. “Questionable” might mean something different to the people in charge.
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I mean, arguably they already self-screen against ‘questionable’ ethics in their officers, the current problem is caused by the fact that what the departments see as ‘questionable’ and what the public sees as ‘questionable’ are so wildly different, hence the idea of having a third party do the job and have firing power for failed testing.
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We already have a third party: the courts. Okay, maybe they can’t fire officers per se, but it’d be difficult to do police work while serving a prison sentence for assault.
Many areas also have several other forms of oversight not run by the police. Wikipedia lists 5 agencies responsible for that in Chicago, as an example. It’s just not clear that any of this stuff ever worked particularly well.
As for self-selection, we’ve all seen how cops behave and what happens to people like Serpico who try to change it.
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A fair point, a third party that has the power to hold police accountable but refuses to do so is if anything worse than nothing at all as it gives the public the mistaken impression that police might be held accountable.
I suppose when I was writing up my comments I was picturing a third-party that actually could and would hold police accountable, because as you so rightly if depressingly noted the ones currently in place do not tick both of those boxes and only one of two demonstrably will not do the trick.
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Fuck you, bootlicker.
Am I missing something? The title of this post says it’s a bad idea for cops, but nothing here seems to have gone remotely badly for any of the cops involved. And I suspect if cops are punished, it’ll be an FTC-style punishment, like “no illegal tasings for 3 years”.
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You’re not missing anything.
The problem is that it’s a bad idea – just not for the cops.
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Preposition chains are ambiguous. WE read the wrong groupings.
What you read:
[Another Settlement Shows Why It’s A Bad Idea For Cops] To Harass People Who Film Them
IN this read, cops who harrass people who film had a bad idea.
What the article described
[Another Settlement Shows Why It’s A Bad Idea] For Cops To Harass People Who Film Them
IN this read, its a bad idea that cops harrass people who film them. Not for the cop, but for the taxpayer.
Even denied immunity for the abusive arrest, by harassing the filmer, the cops have still managed to waste even more money. This is an argument about policy, not about personal consequences.
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Just more @nti-police h@te speech from this site’s resident m@ladjusted @narchist.
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@ccountability’s a bitch, @in’t it?
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hi troll that is getting beat by a spam filter
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Clap like a seal for me, nerd.
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The way you feel compelled to respond whenever there’s an article that triggers your precious fee fees about cops? See you again in the next article calling out your authoritarian bootlicking. Dance cop monkey, dance.
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So that makes you an uneducated jock then?
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Dance for me like a little dumb monkey accompanied by his street-corner organ grinder, dork.
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…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
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The Cass Report
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WPATH Files
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You’re so much of a coward that you can’t even be bothered to actually use the letter “A”? 🤣
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You’re s@ne.
A bad idea for who exactly?
The cops and department in question aren’t paying a cent of the settlement, meanwhile the public is again reminded that even if they succeed in court in might take years of time and gobs of money to eek out a win, while at the time that far off legal win does nothing to help them should a cop be stealing their stuff, smashing their face in and/or hitting them with ‘contempt of cop’ charges to punish them for the audacity of trying to record their actions.
This wasn’t a loss but to call it a ‘win’ takes some real stretching, if you want one of those courts need to start taking settlement amounts out of police pensions or officer wallets as those would get them to care.
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The public. The taxpayer. Everyone who isn’t a cop.
Its a policy arguement tailored to those who care about fiscal responsibility.
Shift the wording to highlight the meaning I think you should try to read – the settlement shows why its a bad idea that cops harass filming bystanders.
They had gotten away with the beating without cost, but the attempt to cover up the beating cost the taxpayer more money.
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Yeah, we don’t need to be shown that, we already know that. It’s the cops who need to be shown that. Nothing in this settlement does that.
Electing people who want to reform law enforcement doesn’t seem to help, maybe we should start electing people willing to lean into the “defund the police” line hard. As in, when the cops whine that accountability efforts and refusing to indemnify cops against malpractice will make it impossible to hire new cops, respond “Good! We don’t need officers who’re so certain they’ll need indemnification (as opposed to a solid defense to clear their names of false accusations).”.
Is this the ho admitting he’s high while working?
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Every accusation a confession.