Leave a Message, Go To Jail

Okian Warrior writes "A man in Weare, New Hampshire was charged with felony wiretapping for recording the police during a traffic stop — based on a cell phone call he made as an officer approached his vehicle. From the article: Police considered it wiretapping because the call was being recorded by a voice mail service without the officer's consent."

Comments

Re:I live in NH, this happens a lot.

[Attila Dimedici]

To be perfectly honest, I think this is perfectly legitimate. The police should approach someone who is standing on the street corner downtown carrying a firearm and a camcorder and question him. If he turns out to be a crackpot retorting with overly dramatic recitals of anything, the officer should politely inform him of any legal limits to his behavior and move on. When the police know they are interacting with such individuals they should go out of their way to be polite. These individuals should be viewed as obnoxious twits who, on those occasions when the police catch them doing something that they can be legitimately charged, as people who got what was coming to them. On those occasions when the police have no legitimate basis to charge these twits, they should be viewed (by both the general public and the police) as good training for police officers to treat innocent civilians with respect, even when those innocent civilians are annoying twits. Too often, the police view the general public as criminals they have yet to catch.