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What to Say When the Police Tell You to Stop Filming Them

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

Hugh Pickens writes:

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."

• Detaining people without any evidence Detaining people without any evidence (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @12:42AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @12:42AM (#180121)

  A recent decision on this sort of bullshit:
  SCOTUS: Delaying Motorists on Highway to Await Dog Sniffing Searches Not OK [alternet.org]

  -- gewg_

  Parent

• Re:Detaining people without any evidence (Score: 1) by Nollij on Saturday May 09 2015, @09:22PM

  by Nollij (4559) on Saturday May 09 2015, @09:22PM (#180863)

  While this is certainly a good ruling, it will have some unintended consequences.
  From SCOTUSBlog [scotusblog.com]:

  And Justice Alito predicts, whether cynically or just realistically, that officers will now be trained on the “prescribed” protocols that will still enable them to conduct traffic-stop dog sniffs if they want to. (He says he “would love to be the proverbial fly on the wall” for such training sessions – really?) Moreover, he finds it “perverse” that if the officer in this case had not waited for a back-up officer for safety reasons, he could have performed a solo dog sniff without any constitutional problem.

  In this case, because Officer Struble agreed that he had “got[ten] all the reasons for the stop out of the way” before conducting the dog sniff, the dog sniff violated Caballes’s Fourth Amendment rule

  Caballes allows a dog sniff if conducted during a reasonable traffic stop time; today’s decision forbids it if it unnecessarily prolongs that time.

  Same way that they're trained to never say they smell alcohol, they smell what seems to be an alcoholic beverage. They just have to use a workaround

  Parent