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Boston Pays Out $170,000 To Man Arrested For Recording Police
Ian Lamont writes "The City of Boston has reached a $170,000 settlement with Simon Glik, who was arrested by Boston Police in 2007 after using his mobile phone to record police arresting another man on Boston Common. Police claimed that Glik had violated state wiretapping laws, but later dropped the charges and admitted the officers were wrong to arrest him. Glik had brought a lawsuit against the city (aided by the ACLU) because he claimed his civil rights were violated. According to today's ACLU statement: 'As part of the settlement, Glik agreed to withdraw his appeal to the Community Ombudsman Oversight Panel. He had complained about the Internal Affairs Division's investigation of his complaint and the way they treated him. IAD officers made fun of Glik for filing the complaint, telling him his only remedy was filing a civil lawsuit. After the City spent years in court defending the officers' arrest of Glik as constitutional and reasonable, IAD reversed course after the First Circuit ruling and disciplined two of the officers for using "unreasonable judgment" in arresting Glik.'"
...that a precedent had been set in by court instead of by settlement. When one party (in this case, the government) is forced by the court to do something, it tends to have more legal weight behind it than when the party instead voluntarily takes an action.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
And it only took 5 years! And it didn't invalidate similar laws in other states, either.
Boston has paid out nothing; Boston tax payers have paid out. There is no downside to law enforcement breaking the law, as they simply fall back on the (apparently) bottomless pockets of the general population. It's unlikely those involved will receive so much as a reprimand, let alone be fired. Even when officers are fired, they simply get re-employed as another location. It's a lose-lose situation for everyone but the officers.
should be 10x that.
Make an example of them until they take our rights seriously. It's obviously a cultural problem they have deep into the roots.
For 5 years of hassle to a citizen's effort to keep the government honest? I think it's a bargain compared to the payments we give out to politicians. Compare this to the millions that CEOs receive? A rounding error. This number is too small, not too large.
ridiculous for falsely arresting someone, then dragging it through the courts for years? Anyway, it says it paid damages AND legal fees. What do you want to bet that 5 years of legal fees are about $160,000? The city got of easy.
this also happened in Mass around 2001 or 2002, where someone was getting harassed and decided to record the procedure. He was a musician and had a recorder of some sort in his car. After all the grief that he took, he brought the tape to internal affairs to have the offending officers reprimanded, and they used the tape against him in a wiretapping case. Now he has been harassed and arrested. WINNING
How can it be "wire" tapping to record what your eyes can plainly see, in public? What wire? What tapping?
Yeah public apology and implementation of more stringent training would have been better, but 170k is pretty good as punitive fine and sets a precedent for future lawsuits. It doesn't say if the department intends to dock the officers' salaries to offset the cost (I hope so).
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Not ridiculous. He was arrested, then spent years in court trying to get the police to do the right thing. What should he have done instead? Stopped when the time he invested became ridiculous? Then they would never change their behavior, and our rights would be even worse off than they are.
The cops are slow to learn.........
http://www.wnd.com/2012/03/student-arrested-for-taking-photo-of-cop/
http://articles.philly.com/2012-03-26/news/31240585_1_police-officer-cops-misdemeanor
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Simon Glik was only able to afford this because he's a lawyer and had the ACLU backing him up. The government is never in a hurry, and has no shame when it comes to spending someone else's funds.
So until, the police and Internal Affairs get caught breaking the law, the law on the books isn't actually followed by the exact people who should know the law? Vigilante justice from within the police system is not a good culture to have brewing. Shouldn't anyone within the policing system that breaks the law or supports breaking the law be fired? Seems to be a conflict of interest to me.
If anything, I expect a larger outrage here about the rights than you would get in most news circles. The average person doesn't care about the rights issue because it's happening to "someone else", whereas the settlements (and the money to fund it) is coming from them the taxpayer and does have an effect on them personally (if it changes tax rates or effects funding on things the other individual cares about). Plus there's the whole "he got money for nothing" angle which is more a jealously thing.
You're not complaining about Slashdot, you're complaining about human nature.
So, does that compensation include:
1) Removing his fingerprints from not only Boston police's files, but the FBI and every other system it was instantly and permanently sent to?
2) Removing all records of his improper and illegal arrest from every system?
Somehow I think information, once collected, is forever there. He will now be "searched", like a suspect, every time prints are run.
Not sure what this guys occupation is, but 5 years later with $170,000 isn't much to show for it. That's $34,000 a year. It's also a payout for his legal fees. Net profit??? In fact, he could still be in negative when it's all said and done.
Life is not for the lazy.
The taxpayers are also the voters. They deserve to pay until they take notice and send a message to their government.
Seriously, you are an idiot.
Glik did not ask to be arrested, but he was. He asked the IAD to investigate, they told him to fuck off and file a civil suit. So he did. And by winning it and costing them $170,000 the Boston police department did what they should have done in the first fucking place - the disciplined the officers involved.
Maybe the tax payers should pay more attention in the future to their local cops.
I don't think the parent poster was lamenting the fact that the guy got a big payout, but that this ended up with a cash settlement instead of being played out to the end to set a legal precedent. Even if he ended up getting $170K (or more) in the end, at least it would have set a legal precedent that should make this kind of thing less likely in the future.
Elmer Fudd comes out and says "Tony you been warry warry baddd".
Seriously oral reprimand? Something like "hey dumbass you just cost us two years of your wages". The sad think is it is the public's money that is going to be used to pay this. So you pay for a police officer, he pisses on a citizens rights then you tax the public some more to pay off for the damage you did. Nice.
I can't believe this was ever an issue. Recording events as they happen, whether it's with a video, audio, or the old-fashioned pen-and-paper method, is a protected right under the first amendment of both the U.S. and most State Constitutions.
And to the person who wished a precedent had been set? Here it is: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/08/28/2030243/mass-court-says-constitution-protects-filming-on-duty-police
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
5 years. Way to go USA justice system. You suck.
Child? I like how the pictures show him as a kid, not as an over 6 foot troubled 17 yo that needed help.
I like how quickly you fell for a Stormfront scam.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
So government employees do something wrong and the court punishes the taxpayers? How about paying that $160k out of the cops retirement fund?
This is like when a Priest gets caught molesting a kid and the Church pays the victim with the congregations money.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
The guy is a family court lawyer. The settlement is $50,000 + lawyers fees (he was represented by the ACLU). The case is decisive in that Boston attempted to have the case dismissed base on limited immunity(i.e. can't sue police for doing their job). The trial court ruled against them (i..e. lawsuit can go ahead). The ruling was appealed and the appeal court handed down a ruling (pdf) that left little doubt how the rest of the trial would go. The appeal court ruling said, in no uncertain terms, that the recording was legal, that it was not secret and Mr. Gliks rights were violated. Given that ruling on a motion to dismiss, there is no way the city would go ahead with a lower trial that would just confirm what the appeals court already said, so they settled.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
If you mean "go the distance" as in set a precedent, then this case already did.
Early in the trial, the city attempted a motion to dismiss on the ground of limited immunity(i.e. can't sue police for doing thier job in good faith). The Citiy's argument was that the wiretap law says you "can't record in secret" and since it wasn't clear that the phone was recording audio, then the audio part of the recording was secret, and therefore the was probable cause for the arrest, and thus limited immunity applied. The appeals court handed down a decision(pdf) in 2011 that drew on over 10 years of precedents that said in no uncertain terms that it wasn't a secret recording, that Mr Glik had the right to record police in public and that any resonable person would have known this. Therefore the police cannot claim llimited immunity.
Faced with such a strong appeals court ruling on the motion to dismiss, it was clear any trial would be lost by the City. So they settled.
The 2011 dismissal appeal decision is a precedent, and has already been used as binding precedent in 1st circut, and as non-binding precedent in all of the other circuits on similar cases. There is one case, I have misplaced the link, where the lawsuit is for an incident that happened before the 2011 glik decision and the police are claiming that since the incident happened before the glik decision, they couldn't know that it was a civil rights violation to arrest someone for this. As far as I can tell, they aren't getting anywhere with that argument. The language of the glik decision makes it clear that it has always been a civil rights violation to arrest someone for openly recording the police in a public space.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
I agree it sucks that taxpayers pick up the tab but I doubt there's a legal way to get at retirement funds. The alternative is they don't pay at all. I don't think that's fair either. If the cops had falsely arrested this guy and the city said "whoa! that's just wrong, you're fired" then maybe it would have been enough. Those taxpaying citizens should be more concerned with false arrest by the people they are paying to enforce the law and by a city government that pisses away money for 5 years defending that action. Maybe some of them will be mad enough at the waste of money to vote out the retards that are in office.
To your priest example, it's completely fair that the congregation that stood by oblivious while some priest molested children for years pays for that. I just find it hard to accept that hundreds, maybe thousands of people were members of these churches and not once did someone notice or have the balls to say "About Father Bob..." It's ludicrous that someone can get away with this stuff for decades. I guarantee that any congregation that's paid out because of molestation is a hell of a lot more careful about who is in the clergy and what they are doing, especially where kids are involved. Sometimes messing with peoples money is the only way to get a change.
So government employees do something wrong and the court punishes the taxpayers? How about paying that $160k out of the cops retirement fund?
This is like when a Priest gets caught molesting a kid and the Church pays the victim with the congregations money.
The cops were working for the city. They authority they abused was derived from the city. The city -- and thus the citizenry -- is responsible for their actions.
Now if the city thinks that it is not at fault for the actions of these employees -- that it wasn't bad management or poor training, etc., but rather something completely out of their control -- then perhaps the city should sue the officers to recover the money.
At any rate, it is important for all employers -- cities, churches, banks, etc. -- to ensure that they hire, manage, and train the employees acting in their name to obey all relevant laws and regulations in the course of their duties. To do any less is to expose the organization to unnecessary liability. This is especially important if you issue the aforementioned employees badges, guns, foreclosure forms, or the ability to invoke eternal damnation.
I am not a crackpot.