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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.
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.
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.
Let it be a lesson to those people electing someone on a "tough on crime" ticket (which in turn means: free reign for the police to do as it likes.) They pay with their tax money for their mistake.
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.
The taxpayers are also the voters. They deserve to pay until they take notice and send a message to their government.
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.
You didn't read the story then (duh). The court tossed qualified immunity for the officers. Glik sued both the city and officers in question and in theory the city could force the cops to split the tab with them (I doubt they will). This should send a big chill through the nations police force as it's now precedent that they can lose immunity for false arrest. That's a HUGE precedent and exposes officers violating peoples rights to civil suits that take them for everything they are worth. Now an officer has to make the choice to falsely arrest someone with the understanding that they could end up in civil court and ordered to pay that person a bunch of money for violating their rights.