Posted on 08/26/2011 7:17:50 PM PDT by Immerito
This is great. (PDF) Here’s what happened:
As he was walking past the Boston Common on the evening of October 1, 2007, Simon Glik caught sight of three police officers — the individual defendants here — arresting a young man. Glik heard another bystander say something to the effect of, “You are hurting him, stop.” Concerned that the officers were employing excessive force to effect the arrest, Glik stopped roughly ten feet away and began recording video footage of the arrest on his cell phone.
After placing the suspect in handcuffs, one of the officers turned to Glik and said, “I think you have taken enough pictures.” Glik replied, “I am recording this. I saw you punch him.” An officer1 then approached Glik and asked if Glik’s cell phone recorded audio. When Glik affirmed that he was recording audio, the officer placed him in handcuffs, arresting him for, inter alia, unlawful audio recording in violation of Massachusetts’s wiretap statute. Glik was taken to the South Boston police station. In the course of booking, the police confiscated Glik’s cell phone and a computer flash drive and held them as evidence.
The charges were dropped. But Glik sued for violations of his civil rights. The First Circuit ruled today that the officers are not protected by qualified immunity. From the ruling:
(Excerpt) Read more at theagitator.com ...
We need a privacy amendment to the Constitution, but not for public employees on official business.
BMFL
VERY good news for LIBERTY and JUSTICE!!
Streets are public places - I don’t see how a citizen could be stopped from photographing anyone...
If the cops are doing their jobs properly they should not care who takes a picture.
The problem is that voices were (or could have been) recorded.
In many states it's legal for citizens to take a photograph without the consent of the subject, but it's illegal to record a voice.
I suspect that had the citizen turned off his cell phone's audio (if that's possible), he wouldn't have been arrested in the first place.
Correct, but it may be more of a Us vs Them attitude that they hold in power. (You can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride and its going to cost you $$).
bump.
If a person is in public, do they have a right to privacy as far as their voice is concerned? I’d say no.
If “the authorities” can record my every movement in public, I can record them at work that my tax dollars pay for.
“If the cops are doing their jobs properly they should not care who takes a picture.”
Worth repeating.
And certainly not when performing their official duties in public.
Laws making it illegal to record the actions of public employees in public are the purview of a police state.
Mark
Video cameras are becoming weapons. It’s amazing.
We need to promote this in order to keep some amount of accountability of public officials in the new age of digital transparency. If only the government has the ability to record, we will fall into a new tyranny.
Or as the defenders of police surveillance cameras so often repeat, "There is no reason to fear being photographed if you are doing nothing wrong." Yet the police, of Boston and many other cities, will accept nothing of the sort when it is themselves who are the subjects of serveillance, ie. citizen surveillance!
Not always.
A young man I’ve known most of his life is a Port St. Lucie cop. I was at a party at his house about a month ago and I asked him about just this subject in regards to the person arrested while filming an arrest from his own front yard.
He said if he thought the person was taping to try to catch him or the other officers doing wrong then he would take the tape.
I argued that it was legal and he argued that it was not.
I simply told him it was a subject that would be decided by the courts.
Bump.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.