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Is Videotaping the Police a Felony?
AtomicSnarl writes "When Carlisle, PA, police noticed their traffic stop was being videotaped, they arrested the fellow with the camera for felony wiretapping. From the story: 'Kelly is charged under a state law that bars the intentional interception or recording of anyone's oral conversation without their consent... An exception to the wiretapping law allows police to film people during traffic stops.. [An assistant DA] said case law is in flux as to whether police can expect not to be recorded while performing their duties.'"
I'm guessing that if it's illegal to take a picture of police than it's also illegal to film them.
So, I guess if you want to videotape the police, you'd better declare yourself an independent journalist and hope the judge values our freedom of the press?
This is both shocking & amazing on so many levels. I can think of several ways to look at this that make it hilariously backwards. The cops are on duty, their income is supplied by individuals like this man. As far as I'm aware, employers are allowed to videotape their employers.
I've met good policemen and I've met pigs. These instances sound like a pig on a power trip. Illegal wiretapping, yeah right! It has a sound function so he's wiretapping? Everything just sounds so ridiculous. If it happens in public, it's public domain. This is just obvious abuse of those they are supposed to protect.
My work here is dung.
Nothing better than a law which let's a public entity have legal protection from public oversight.
Its almost the same situation with guy who got permission from a land owner to sit on the property and video tape police. The judge considered it unlawful seizer, and he won the case. Mainly because video taping is a legitimate way of gathering evidence. The full case is at http://www.paed.uscourts.gov/documents/opinions/05 D0847P.pdf
That case was federal, I have no idea about state laws but in theory it could be appealed and possibly get the federal court involved.
It's an old saw of photography that in a place where a celebrity does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, you can take their photo without permission. You can even publish it. When I was handling photos for a major movie site, I had to remind agents and managers of this when they'd try to bluster about how neither they nor their client authorized us to run a photo they didn't like from a premiere or party. We didn't need their authorization.
/. post elements:
Now take something that is within the public interest, recording a police officer in the performance of his/her duties in a public place. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? If there isn't an exception to the wiretapping laws when a citizen records the police, but there is an exception when the police record citizens, there is something seriously wrong with that law. This case bears watching.
- Greg
P.S.: And to have some stereotypical
In Soviet Russia, the police record *you*.
1: Record Police Officer
2: Get Arrested For Felony
3: ???
4: Profit!!
I, for one, welcome our new wiretapping overlords.
Start a happiness pandemic
I guess my question is "Why SHOULDN'T you be able to videotape police officers doing their job?". Seriously.
And what's with this wiretapping nonsense? That doesn't even make sense, how do you wiretap the air? Last I checked it wasn't a series of wires...
"Kelly is charged under a state law that bars the intentional interception or recording of anyone's oral conversation without their consent."
Okay...what? Why is this illegal? I mean, I can see some potential for abuse, recording someone saying something and using it to incriminate them etc. But seriously, if you say it aloud to someone they can report that you say it in court (presumably without hearsay as, as far as I know, that only applies to stating facts you heard from someone else, not what someone else said. As in I can say "Billy said..." in court but not "I know that because Billy said so")
I mean, I'm sure this law is great for privacy freaks, but it just seems off. If you're going to say something to me why don't I have the right to record it? My brain's already doing that, what's wrong with having a more accurate representation of it? You'd prefer I improperly remember you saying "I'm gonna blow them up!" and not have the recording that actually says "He's gonna blow them up?" I wouldn't mind people recording my conversations, why would you ever say anything you wouldn't want recorded to another human being with a memory?
Just seems like an off law to me. The case itself, not so much. If it's illegal there, no matter how off that law may be, then he should be arrested. However I'd hope he could get off with only a fine due to the extreme obscurity and horrible naming policy (really, they're supposed to know that videotaping someone talking is wiretapping?).
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
"Hey, if the police have nothing to hide, why do they object to being videotaped?"
When those who enforce the law are above it we are on the road to becoming a fascist oligarchy -if we aren't already.
Of course we have an executive branch which has put itself above the law in the name of terrorism and freedumb(sic)....
and a legislature which does not have the will to fix our healthcare crisis because they have their own healthcare system which isolates them from the f'd up system the rest of us are dealing with.....
There must be literally HUNDREDS of cases since Rodney King in which cops (especially LA cops) have been caught doing bad, abusive and unconstitutional things to perps -er citizens.
There should be no right of public officials to privacy while they conduct the tasks that they are allegedly performing on our behalf.
Cameras and things like open government sessions are about the accountability which is becoming rarer in this society.
LET THE SUNSHINE IN (ie. 'sunshine' laws)
I'm just sayin'
I'm sorry, but this is pure bullshit, through-and-through. Police officers in America are authorized and equipped to use *lethal* force, and in most courts their word is taken as gospel over a civilian. Due to departmental 'solidarity' successfully prosecuting even the worst cases is incredibly difficult.
If anything, police officers ought to be required by law to wear pickups that record ALL sound and a snapshot every 10 seconds while they are on duty. Ideally, said recordings would also be instantly transmitted to a secured location which nobody in their headquarters has access to for archival purposes.
This is state. Recording laws vary state to state and in PA, it's a state where all participants in a conversation must be informed they are being recorded (for audio at least). There are plenty of states this is not the case for. This all predates 9/11, Bush, and whatever other big brother federal things you are thinking of by quite some time.
If you don't believe there was criminal intent, why the fuck was he arrested & why should he plead guilty to a lessor charge ?
Sue the fuckers !
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I forget which case it was, I had to do a research project on it about 4 years ago, but it involved wiretapping in public areas. The incident involved wiretapping a payphone booth that was used regularly by the defendent for placing bets on sports events over the phone (both betting on sports and gambling over phone lines were illegal at the time.) The FBI claimed that because the pay phone was in a public area that they were free to tap it because it wasn't considered a private area. The court ruled in favor of the defendent, stating that conversations in this type of pay phone booth, which had a door that closed so nobody outside could hear, was reasonably expected by the publicto be a place where one could hold a conversation in private. The general ruling is that if there is a commonly accepted expectation of privacy, a warrant is required. The incidence for the case here is that the police were out in public on the streets. Nobody can reasonably believe that a conversation in the street is a private event. Therefore, this case should be closed and in favour of Mr. Kelly. Update: The case I referenced in the beginning of this post is Katz v. United States. I found an audio recording of the case 4 years ago that was in mp3 format. It can be found at http://www.oyez.org/oyez/resource/case/198/argumen t.mp3, along with the transcript at http://www.oyez.org/oyez/audio/198/argument-ra.smi l
What happened to all that claptrap about if you've got nothing to hide you should'nt mind being taped?
Isn't that the crap the authorities come back with when people complain about CCTV cameras?
I'm guessing the COPS were videotaping the arrest with a car camera, if so, THEY have already CONSENTED
to having their actions recorded while on the job.
They are employees of the public going about public business IN PUBLIC. They damn well better be able to be recorded
or we are in serious trouble.
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
Just ask MPAA and RIAA.
Oh, you meant actual cops? Never mind.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
The officer probably didn't know of the wiretap law either, and the DA was fortunate to find it, or they'd be even worse off than they are now. Arrested for no reason at all. They clearly wanted to harass and scare the kid, which the obviously succeeded at. Now the city should fork over $100K compensation, along with a sincere apology in the process.
If it ever goes to trial, and I was on the jury, it would be Jury Nullification all the way, baby!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"Kelly is charged under a state law that bars the intentional interception or recording of anyone's oral conversation without their consent."
The officer DID consent to have the conservation recorded. In fact, he was recording it with his own audio/video system.
He didn't consent to have it on the defendant's tape... but unless the statute draws that line, the court should not either.
No its not. They're public agents. Public agents are granted special powers over private citizens to be able to perform their duties. In the interests of preventing abuse of those special powers, public agents should not expect the same level of privacy (esp. in the process of using those powers) as private citizens gets.
Agreed. Would you say that this is step 5 or step 8?
Between the falling angel and the rising ape
I guess this would fall under "attempting to police the police" (which IS needed in a lot of cases) and is one of the actions listed in the FBI JTTF pamphlet as being the action of a "potential domestic terrorist."
This is bullshit. It's clear that this is an abuse of power to stop people from being able to document further abuses of power. It's meant to also have a chilling effect and prevent others from doing the same.
Remember, one of the stated definitions of "terrorist" by the current administration is people who:
are Defenders of the Constitution
reference the constitution and the bill of rights
are property rights advocates
are loners
this is from an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force pamphlet which you can see here:
http://www.welfarestate.com/pamphlet/
If a cop is doing his or her job, he or she should be proud to be videotaped.
Now if someone was following a cop all day with a videocam for no good reason, I can see where that could maybe be an issue - but it should be fine to videotape a traffic stop on a public street, especially if you are the one being stopped.
The fascism keeps creeping.
I have never ever, ever met a good policeperson. Not even mediocre. 90% of America also shares this sentiment. (the other 10% being the most wealthy)
That sounds silly and made up. Most of our experience with policemen come when we're pulled over for speeding or some other traffic infraction. It's happened to me probably ten times in my life. Never once have I had a problem in any of the four states I was pulled over. In each case, the policeman was professional and polite. These incidents happened from the year I got my driver's license at 16 years old and was driving a beat up, 13+ year old Mustang, in another case driving a kind of old Honda Accord with a friend, another time when I was along with two other friends driving an early model Hyundai, and another time driving a Geo Storm. And yet another time when a friend and I decided to sleep in that same Hyundai in a shopping center parking lot in the L.A. area rather than spending money on a hotel; in retrospect, that probably looked very suspicious. And with the possible exception of the Geo Storm (which was new and pretty at the time), none of the cars gave an impression of me/us being anywhere near wealthy. And when we were in other states, there was definitely no way the policeman knew by the address on my driver's license that it was a upper middle-class neighborhood. But I've always been treated well.
I think how a policeman behaves has a lot more to do with the demeanor of the person that he is dealing with. If you're an ass, don't expect stellar treatment. Granted, being an ass isn't an excuse for them to treat you poorly, but there's no reason to be an ass to start with. Just be a polite human being and I bet you find that the police do the same. That's been my experience, anyway.
On the other hand, maybe you're right. Maybe 90% of the population does agree with you because 90% of the population do tend to be asses and then wonder why they "don't get no respect."
We really need more people filming the police.
It seems that police brutality is getting so common now that they are willing to beat members of the media on camera . (The clip begins with the narrator suggesting that the protestors were "asking for it" by throwing rocks at the police, but they can't spin the footage of their own camerapeople getting beaten up.)
What's worse, is that police now tend to focus on people with cameras , as you can also see in the above video.
The tapes are very helpful in prosecuting police misconduct , so we neeed more people taping.
Otherwise, the police tend to lie about the incidents , even going so far to claim in the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in Britain that 5 different cameras watching the action were all somehow not functioning .
In a Missouri case, a teenager was being harassed by the police at a DUI checkpoint for not telling them where he was going -- when he asked why he was being detained, he was told "If you don't stop running your mouth, we're going to find a reason to lock you up tonight".
Cameras are getting tinier and tinier all the time, and now we have Wi-Fi enabled storage cards. When cameras get so small the cops can't see them, and people can record the content wirelessly to hidden devices, it will be a lot harder for the bad cops to stop the filming of the brutality.
By this interpretation of the law anyone with a camcorder at a back yard cookout or public event is committing a felony, unless you have permission from everyone there. Unless they call out every exception, then TV news crews are roving criminal bands. It's ridiculous. The fact they're police officers is irrelevant. There's no expectation of privacy in a public place and the same standards should apply to audio as video.
This is completely insane.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
There's a big difference between their rights as citizens and their rights while acting as agents of the government.
Off-duty police officers have the rights as anyone else.
On-duty, those rights are restricted. Police officers and other public servants do not have an expectation of privacy while carrying out their duties. Why do police officers have name tags and numbered badges? To identify them both so that they can carry out their duties and so that they can be identified while carrying out their duties.
The police have a lot more "power" than the average citizen. I can't tell a random person on the street to move along. I can't ask people for their ID's. I can't hit or shoot people because they fail to comply with my instructions.
I'm sorry that you think that restricting the power of public servants is somehow restricting their human rights. It is not and it is a necessary and fundamental principle for a free society.
I think you're slightly mistaken there. In my transportation engineering class, we were recently taught that the posted speed limit is about 85% of the design speed of the highway (rounded to the nearest 5mph). The design speed is presumably the maximum "safe" speed, although I'm not sure how it's determined. I imagine it's based on some kind of lowest-common-denominator, like a half-blind old lady driving a huge Buick with drum brakes, or a semi, or something. One thing I can tell you it's not though, is that it's not based on a survey of existing traffic speeds -- you have to design the road before the traffic exists! And also it's not so much that "15% percent of people" should be speeding, it's that it should be safe for [100% of] people to go 15% faster than the posted limit.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
As a fire fighter, I work with PD frequently. Despite what you see on TV, most of the FF/PD back and forth is overall friendly or at worst good natured sparing.
I know many officers. Some are good, some are not good. Most are somewhere in the middle. The youngest, smallest ones have in my experience been the ones closer to the stereotype. I refer to these as "25 year olds with their first mirrored shades and a gun" and are dangerous to themselves as much as the public they insult. Most though, grow up and become good natured and humble just like we all try to.
Cops are people, and suffer the same foibles as the rest of us. For them, like all others, power is a drug to be taken in small doses.
When you give a little man a little power, you create a big problem.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Police can be assholes independently of any citizen actions. I was getting a slow flat that I didn't notice immediately. Later I was told I'd run over a spike which caused the leak (covered under tire warantee!). I was starting to notice the steering was getting less responsive -- driving on a curvy 4-lane highway. At first I thought it was a fluke or maybe I wasn't paying attention, but paying full attention, it became difficult to avoid going into a center divide, and the tire blew the rest of the way then. I calmly signaled to get over in outer lane (no loss of control of vehicle), pulled over at a turnout. I was followed when pulling over by an off-duty cop who thought I was "inebriated". At that point, I wasn't quite sure what had happened (had I hit something? (no), did my tire or car hit the center divide and that's what caused the blow out? (no). I was on my way to a doctor's appointment. Was a hot day and was wearing a skirt, light top and middle-to-low height sandals (not flats, but not high heels -- fine for shopping in, but not taking outdoor hikes in). The policeman called fellow pigs to the scene and convinced them I was under the influence of "something".
I was quite cooperative, told them any meds I was taking (none of which would have caused impairment -- had been taking them for long time). On the side of the road, on rough gravel and on a hill side, they had me trying to walk the straight line in the mid-heeled sandals that, at best, might be comfortable to walk in, but not pirouette on an incline and rough gravel. So they decided to arrest me. Then they refused to allow me to get a jacket, sweater, or any warmer clothes. Even lied to me, saying they'd get my bag (they didn't) so I could put on a jacket. They then took me downtown and my car was towed. The breathalyser on the scene was negative, but that wouldn't have showed effects of other drugs. Downtown they took a pee test AND a blood test (both, a week or two later came back negative). But meanwhile, they locked me up for 8 hours to "sober up" (since they couldn't get the blood and urine tests back for a few to several days). Locked up, down in basement, where it was 65 degrees -- and I was dressed for 80's and sunny.
It cost me $40 for a taxi ride at midnight to the lot where they had towed my car where I had to pay over $200 for an after-hours "release". I put the spare on the car in 10 minutes and was on way home. Then I had to deal with a DUI charge that I wasn't guilty of. I had to hire a lawyer to deal with the court issues, since otherwise, they'd want me to be in court 45 miles away at 8am to enter my plea. The lawyer was able to talk to the DA's office the morning of the trial. They found nothing in my blood other than the 'scripts I'd told them about and they decided to drop the charges. They refused to return my prescriptions -- and ran me around in circles trying to get them from the police -- who eventually refused because, they claimed, they were not doctors and it would be illegal for them to return my prescriptions as they were not doctors -- I'd need a court order.
At this point I was out $250 for the night I had to get home from jail and another $1200 down to the lawyer. The court order to return my meds would have cost, minimum, another $800-1000, so gave up that idea and just went into the pharmacy for refills a bit early.
So I'm out $1500 due to some cop thinking my "flat tire" causing steering problems was me being "DUI" -- no recourse to get the money. I found out 3-4 years later (!!!) when I went to get insurance on a new car, that the cop at the scene had reported it to the DMV as an accident. The asshole cop didn't even check to see if my car had any scratches on it -- and the tire had no side-wall damage (as would be the case if I brushed against the center divide). Nevertheless the idiot recorded it as an accident which caused me to have to do some explaining to my insurance company to supposedly tell them about my "accident". I didn't know anything about an acc
It is my understanding that this audio was only recently "discovered." I can assure you during my military service I NEVER received an order to fire my weapon like that. Maybe "Ready, Aim, Fire" or "Contact [direction], Fire" ...never something like "Get Set! Point! Fire!" They just aren't ligitimate weapons commands. It sounds to me like some agitator wanted to add it and just messed it all up. He may be able to fool someone who has never been on a weapons range, but not anyone who has actually put rounds downrange.