Easier said than done.
My experience relates to the UK rather than the US but I imagine the situations aren’t all that different. My two brothers were on a night out and my eldest brother got into a dispute with a policeman, now I believe my brother was in the right but even if he wasn’t it’s not relevant to what happened next. He was arrested by the police and handcuffed and at that point my other brother, who hadn’t been involved remotely in what had preceded this started filming the situation, at that point the senior officer indicated to a woman officer to stop him, she approached my brother and he said he had every right to film what was happening (it was in the middle of the street, remember every street corner in the UK has 24 hour CCTV so this shouldn’t be a problem), the officer told him he had no right and at that point the filming abruptly finished.
The next morning both brothers were taken from their police cells, both of them with bloody noses and one with missing teeth to be prosecuted for assault and breach of the peace. They then asked for the return of the camera, it was returned to them in pieces, the sergeant explaining that it must have got broken in the fracas.
At this point however the story gets interesting, the cops in their stupidity smashed the camera but obviously didn’t realise they should delete the video from the memory chip. Six months later the video was produced in court, the cops were proven to be liars and all eleven charges were thrown out against my brothers, they are currently suing the police.
But the important point is that this only ended happily because of the cops’ stupidity, if they had succesfully wiped the video my brothers could have ended up behind bars for the serious offence of assaulting police officers.
So don’t always assume that your rights will be respected by the police. This might come as a shock to some people but sometimes cops lie, sometimes they even wrongfully beat up people, you really do have to be careful even if the law is (supposedly) on your side.
These cases will become a lot more interesting once all of these cellphone cameras have “live to the net” recording capabilities enabled by default.
Fixed.