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posted by CoolHand on Thursday May 07 2015, @11:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the get-back-to-eating-your-donuts dept.

Robinson Meyer writes in The Atlantic that first of all, police shouldn't ask. "As a basic principle, we can't tell you to stop recording," says Delroy Burton, a 21-year veteran of DC's police force. "If you're standing across the street videotaping, and I'm in a public place, carrying out my public functions, [then] I'm subject to recording, and there's nothing legally the police officer can do to stop you from recording." What you don't have a right to do is interfere with an officer's work. ""Police officers may legitimately order citizens to cease activities that are truly interfering with legitimate law enforcement operations," according to Jay Stanley who wrote the ACLU's "Know Your Rights" guide for photographers, which lays out in plain language the legal protections that are assured people filming in public. Police officers may not confiscate or demand to view your digital photographs or video without a warrant and police may not delete your photographs or video under any circumstances.

What if an officer says you are interfering with legitimate law enforcement operations and you disagree with the officer? "If it were me, and an officer came up and said, 'You need to turn that camera off, sir,' I would strive to calmly and politely yet firmly remind the officer of my rights while continuing to record the interaction, and not turn the camera off," says Stanley. The ACLU guide also supplies the one question those stopped for taking photos or video may ask an officer: "The right question to ask is, 'am I free to go?' If the officer says no, then you are being detained, something that under the law an officer cannot do without reasonable suspicion that you have or are about to commit a crime or are in the process of doing so. Until you ask to leave, your being stopped is considered voluntary under the law and is legal."

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by rts008 on Thursday May 07 2015, @03:20PM

    by rts008 (3001) on Thursday May 07 2015, @03:20PM (#179947)

    Yeah, not a good 'loop' to be caught up in.

    I see this as the expected outcome of the mindset of 'declaring war on drugs, terror, etc'....

    That sets up an adversarial system that can't help but devolve to 'us vs. them' mentality, and the inevitable 'enemy' emerges.
    And one of the factors of an enemy: you de-humanize them to fight them, and the more you fight them, the more like them you become. It goes downhill from there.

    Our Constitution(and Ammendments) had been set up to forestall this, but when you militarize(armed/armored assault vehicles, equipment, arms, and mindset) the Nation's law enforcement, you sidestep the whole issue of using the US military against it's citizens.

    The more time goes on in this direction, I find myself falling back on my training(US Army), and thinking and acting like an insurgent(without the 'striking back') just to stay alive and out of jail. I have felt like the cops where the 'enemy' since the latter part of the 1970's, and it has only gotten worse until '9-11' and the PATRIOT Act, that's when it jumped to a whole new level.
    And when paying attention to the news lately, I do not seem to be alone in thinking/feeling like this.

    I'm not resigned to my fate, or ready to kick off the 2nd revolution(or third-the Civil war...YMMV) just yet. There may still be hope.
    The news in the past few months seem to show that the public's negative reaction has reached a level that might be enough for reforms to actually take place. (Fergeson, MO, and Baltimore, MD, for example)
    It's getting enough media coverage, and election season has started, so we will see....

    Keep filming/recording like there's no time left, everyone...Kick it up a notch even!

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