Man Ordered At Gunpoint To Hand Over Phone For Recording Cops

HungryHobo writes with this excerpt from a story at Pixiq: "Miami Beach police did their best to destroy a citizen video that shows them shooting a man to death in a hail of bullets on Memorial Day. First, police pointed their guns at the man who shot the video, according to a Miami Herald interview with the videographer. Then they ordered the man and his girlfriend out of the car and threw them down to the ground, yelling, 'you want to be f****** paparazzi?' Then they snatched the cell phone from his hand and slammed it to the ground before stomping on it. Then they placed the smashed phone in the videographer's back pocket as he was laying down on the ground."

Comments

Re:Ahhh crime.

[jra]

I'm fairly certain this gent has a 42USC1983 claim against all of the individual officers involved, and I *certainly* hope he's taking advice on that point.

Anothe video of the incident...

[pongo000]

...can be found here. Rather chilling.

Re:What we need are cops who aren't thugs

[russotto]

It is in at least the states of Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland.

It's legal to film and record police in Maryland. The case mentioned in your link went to the Maryland Circuit Court for Harford County and was ruled not a violation of the law. "A law enforcement officer has no reasonable expectation of privacy in encounters with citizens in public places"

Re:Ahhh crime.

[Ariven]

Yes, http://qik.com/ Qik supports android and iPhone.. it worked well on my 3g and works fine on my android.

Re:Any laywers here?

[Omnifarious]

It definitely is and assuming that this is a somewhat accurate description of what happened, the police officers involved could easily find themselves behind bars for witness tampering, destruction of evidence amongst other things. And police officers do get sent to prison from time to time for this sort of behavior.

Every once in a great while when there is a massive public outcry and there are no other politically viable alternatives, yes, they do. This is far, far less often than it should happen. Of the instances of police overstepping their bounds I have heard of exactly one police officer being fired, and that was for a clear case of murder that was committed on camera and the victim was a homeless person who was well known and liked. The officer's excuse was that the man (who was known as 'the woodcarver' by locals) had a knife, and he did not put it down in the 2.5 seconds between the time the officer told him to and the time he fired. The man made no threatening gesture with the knife.

I have never heard of a police officer going to jail.