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from the 'give-me-your-Bill'-said-the-officer dept.
In the light of the heated discussions about a certain bill signed in Indiana, here is a more refreshing news about a proposed bill in Colorado. The state of Colorado is considering a bill that outlines punishments for police officers who interfere with photographers. House Bill 15-1290 is titled "Concerning Prohibiting A Peace Officer From Interfering With A Person Lawfully Recording A Peace Officer-Involved Incident".
The bill states that if a person is lawfully documenting a police officer and then has their imagery seized or destroyed without a warrant, they are entitled to $15,000 for actual damages plus attorney fees and costs. The bill also would be applied when a police officer intentionally interferes with a person's ability to capture images.
It seems the bill came up as a result of the number of news reports about police officers telling people "Give me your camera", or taking the data away.
The story is covered further in The Denver channel and PetaPixel.
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:28PM
we can only hope it will be adopted by other states
Why?
It only dis-incentivizes nuisance actions like threatening people at a street fair for photographing someone doing everything mostly legally.
If you're filming cops behaving badly, $15K is enough to make them harass you and destroy your camera because it'll never cost more than $15K.
So you're banning stuff that doesn't really matter while making it really cheap with a firm fixed cost ceiling when they stop a photographer doing something actually important.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:36PM
Reminds me I have been meaning to invest in button cams.