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I immediately wondered how the Rodney King case would have been different if it was affected by a law of this kind. Does anyone know if the video footage would have been inadmissable?

On a different note, I have spent a lot of time in developing countries, and some of the most consistent hallmarks are ridiculous bans on photographing anything government-related. Laws like this in the US make me worry about the country sliding backwards into dysfunction.

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The catch with most of these statutes is that the part that is illegal is the audio recording. If you record video without an audio track or are too far away for any audio of the encounter to be heard then you are usually in the clear. In the King case my memory of the video is that it was shot from a distance and that you can't really hear anything (checking a few archives seems to confirm that the only thing that you can really hear is helicopter noise.)

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