And think about it the other way too: A police officer should want to be recorded while on duty and interacting with citizens. No more false accusations of police brutality, etc. The recording doesn't even have to be public - just available at a moment's notice by court order at least.
Not only should all law enforcement be recorded, they should be the ones required to record at all times while on the clock.
If they do not like it, do not be law enforcement.
That should sort out the honest ones from the dishonest rather quickly.
Any cop can make your life living hell in a heartbeat. Anyone who is against recording has just never been on the wrong side of a cop. You have ZERO chance.
I agree you should be allowed to record anything a police officer does in the line of duty. I'm all for going one step further and requiring all uniformed police officers to wear bodycams at all times. But we just shouldn't set the bar at "if I can see it or hear it I can record it".
You are a private citizen. A police officer is not while in the process of carrying out their duty. This is, in part, why they wear a uniform and why the are badged and numbered.
The police have a very special and privileged place in our society. They apply the law which means that they individually (and as a group) are given special rights by society for our protection. However, they are in a unique (and uniquely easy) position to abuse those extra rights.
How can we fight corruption if the people who's job it is to fight corruption are corrupt? How can we prove that they aren't? The extra powers the police are given make it very easy for them to be corrupt and to hide the fact.
Complaints against the police force are rarely about them recording their work, it is about them recording private citizen't going about their business for no good reason. Legitimate protestors legitimately protesting.
The police complain that they shouldn't have to be recorded going about their business as no-one else puts up with that. But they are wrong. They apply the law, the final step in the chain — and that isn't recorded. Everything said in parliament is recorded, everything said in court is recorded.
Hell, even truck drivers have tacographs!
Should police cars have dash-cams in this day and age? Yes.
Should police have google-glass-like recorders recording what they see and what they do? Yes probably.
Should a police gun record everything it shoots? definitely.
And the same applies for prisons and prison officers.
These are exactly the people who society has a valid, just reason to record in their duty.
A good cop has nothing to fear from more cameras. Even better—automating the process should, if done correctly, mean the death of a ton of paperwork.
The other argument for the police recording themselves is the fact that recording equipment is now so prevalent on walls and in the hands of the citizenry that they would surely need their own evidence to back up what the cops say. How many jury's will continue to take the word of a cop over two conflicting video recordings? Imagine how persuasive video footage of a cop being punched in the goggles would be? Surely the cops need that?
Another good argument for mandatory recordings of cops during arrests. I think even just audio would be a really good start and is a lot easier to capture and store in the field than video. Sure, it's a lot easier to edit and fake too but I'm sure a reasonably tamper proof device exists. Every company I've worked for records phone calls, this shouldn't be any different.
There is no inconsistency here. A desire to record the police stems from the fact that there is a huge discrepancy in power in any interaction between a police officer and a normal citizen and that the police officer is on duty to uphold the laws established by society at large. That is a drastically different set of circumstances than wanting to record any average person all the time.
And personally, I don't want to have to live my life in a way where everything I say or do is on the record. I want the freedom to be able to make remarks and jokes that would be appropriate among friends but not to any random person. I don't want to have to phrase everything I say as PC as possible knowing that it will be stored forever.
While there are cases where privacy rights should kick in (your example of private phone calls is a good one), I cannot imagine how an on-duty and in uniform officer doing something in public (where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy) should expect to not be recorded. That officer is armed and dangerous. In some circumstances, is legally allowed to use deadly force against citizens. Abuse of that power has happened to frequently to claim that the officer needs privacy to carry out their public service.
I don't understand why the police even care if they are being recorded. They are well training and should know the boundaries in which they need to operate, so someone recording them shouldn't be a big deal. Heck, a lot of times they record themselves (dash cams).
Disclosure: I have two brothers that are police officers
I agree that police should answer to the public, but are video recordings necessary for this? Corruption and excessive force seem like great arguments for police surveillance, but let's say you're a cop and you're stuffing down donuts in the coffee shop (excuse the stereotype, I mean it in jest only), and someone tapes it and throws it up on youtube. I don't think this is unlikely at all, and I think it's a total abuse of the officer's privacy.
Now you have a case of libel right? How does that work? Does it compensate for the damages that could be done to your reputation, the damages to the occupation itself? Does it sit in the courts for 2 years? My assumption is that suing after the fact would be an ineffective way, if it was the only way, to protect your privacy. I'll admit to not knowing much about these laws in the states though, and am open to being educated and corrected on the subject.
What also concerns me, is how would this affect police recruitment? Sure there's some bad eggs, but I have to believe that most people who become a police officer actually believe that what they're doing is a public and necessary service. Don't you think we'd lose a lot of great and ethical talent that would simply choose a less invasive career if they were made subject to constant surveillance?
There are other public offices too, which could just as easily support a case for surveillance. Like teaching. I can totally see someone arguing for teacher surveillance because it's the kids who are important after all... we'd lose a lot of quality teachers.
Anyways, I'm not sure I'm making my argument that solid. The fact is, I really don't like the idea of public surveillance though, regardless of who being recorded and who's doing the recording, and I don't think I'm alone. I don't like government employees recording us without consent, and I don't like us recording public employees without consent. It just leaves a really bad taste in my mouth either way.
I'm not too keen on that. They should have some privacy when they aren't interacting with the public. Nobody wants to be taped while they are eating, or discussing things with a colleague. And the more unpleasant it is to be a police officer, the worse officers you'll get.
However, they should monitor themselves (with video) whenever they are interacting with the public. This helps them gather solid evidence. If they "forgot" to turn on the camera, or "lost" the disk, the judge and jury should be asking why.
Recording the police has got be a good thing almost all the time. Unless they can "accidentally" not record an encounter or "accidentally" delete one, it will most certainly place moral pressure on the officers.
We all know they have never had legal a duty to protect any civilian, but whenever it was that police subtly turned from a "protect and serve" ideology into "law enforcement" was a dark transition for America.
maybe all police officers should have to record audio and video and do a live broadcast while on duty (someone has to make sure their equipment is working properly)...
While I agree that it should be allowed to tape any interactions you have with an officer, it's a bit of a gray area if you follow one around taping everything they do.
First: they are off duty sometimes (they get breaks too)
Second: They are dealing with other people, and that interaction deserves a level of privacy as well. If I follow a officer up to a car stop, and start recording, that seems intrusive.
So, the question is where the limit of permissible is. Do off duty police officers have normal citizen rights to prevent themselves from being taped? Do on break officers have that? How about on duty officers talking with another person? Can I record that audio? Video?
In my mind it should be more permissible than taking video of normal people, but a blanket "lets tape everything" doesn't work either. Where exactly the correct middle ground lies isn't clear to me.
Recording the police doing their job in public in generally legal and is a protected First Amendment activity. Courts keep ruling in favor of recording police. Laws prohibiting it are not constitutional.
>Openly recording the police is prohibited in two states - Illinois and Massachusetts
Last week the City of Boston agreed to pay Simon Glik $170,000 in damages and legal fees to settle a civil rights lawsuit stemming from his 2007 felony arrest for videotaping police roughing up a suspect. Prior to the settlement, the First Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that Glik had a “constitutionally protected right to videotape police carrying out their duties in public.” The Boston Police Department now explicitly instructs its officers not to arrest citizens openly recording them in public.
The law in 38 states plainly allows citizens to record police, as long as you don’t physically interfere with their work. Police might still unfairly harass you, detain you, or confiscate your camera. They might even arrest you for some catchall misdemeanor such as obstruction of justice or disorderly conduct. But you will not be charged for illegally recording police.
Twelve states—California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington—require the consent of all parties for you to record a conversation.
However, all but 2 of these states—Massachusetts and Illinois—have an “expectation of privacy provision” to their all-party laws that courts have ruled does not apply to on-duty police (or anyone in public). In other words, it’s technically legal in those 48 states to openly record on-duty police.
....
Fortunately, judges and juries are soundly rejecting these [anti-police recording] laws. Illinois, the state with the most notorious anti-recording laws in the land, expressly forbids you from recording on-duty police. Early last month an Illinois judge declared that law unconstitutional, ruling in favor of Chris Drew, a Chicago artist charged with felony eavesdropping for secretly recording his own arrest. Last August a jury acquitted Tiawanda Moore of secretly recording two Chicago Police Internal Affairs investigators who encouraged her to drop a sexual harassment complaint against another officer. (A juror described the case to a reporter as “a waste of time.”) In September, an Illinois state judge dropped felony charges against Michael Allison. After running afoul of local zoning ordinances, he faced up to 75 years in prison for secretly recording police and attempting to tape his own trial.
Police officers have a lot of discretion and I'm not sure that a camera is always the best way to get preferential treatment within that discretion. It may be legal but in addition to the courts recognizing it as acceptable officers need to do the same. A court decision will not change the perception of recording among officers but hopefully as more people exercise their rights it will become commonplace and not stigmatized by the police.
I'm still in favor of absolute recording rights despite all that. You're quite right to point out chilling effects of active recording, but you have to also consider that bad police behavior is chilling in and of itself. People don't want to make reports when the police might make things worse or neglect things they're supposed to help with. Recording can help with that and will become less common as bad police are held to better account. Another thing that can balance that would be for police stations to have a reception desk with a transparent, soundproof box for citizens to make reports with some privacy and safety regardless of recording.
Several courts have found that recording police, including audio, is legal because a public employee doing their job in a public location has no reasonable expectation of privacy. The privacy argument has been used in several jurisdictions and they've consistently lost the cases.
I don't know if that will apply everywhere, but the ACLU is of the opinion that recording police when they are making arrests is always legal and always ethical, and they've put their money where their mouth is by becoming involved in several of those cases. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if it's always true, but I know where I stand on the ethics of the thing: it's always right to record a police officer making an arrest, and it's always wrong for a police officer to harass, assault, arrest, or threaten someone who is merely recording an arrest. Hopefully the law agrees with that, because any police officer doing his job ethically should have no fear of the public seeing him doing that job.
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