Maryland Judge finds that it is legal to record police in public | Hacker News Reader

Maryland Judge finds that it is legal to record police in public

hellforleathermagazine.com

176 pointsMartinCron45 comments

> An attorney representing [the police] said the ruling, “will make it more difficult for the police to do their jobs.”

If your job as a cop is hindered by being videotaped while in public areas, then your job is by definition not in the public's interest, and you should not be allowed (and especially paid) to conduct it.

It seems to me that the logical conclusion of their claim is that people shouldn't even be allowed to watch the police -- not only shouldn't there be a recording, but there shouldn't be any witnesses either.

amen. not always the case, but certainly true most of the time. I haven't heard a satisfactory explanation from police of why the job becomes so hard all of a sudden. Unless its necessary to break the law to do your job and lack of a record keeps you from being prosecuted.

I know the real world is different than most people think, but I also think most of the pressure to break the law probably comes from having to enforce laws that shouldn't be on the books anyway, like drug laws.

Are there sensible scenarios under which it's reasonable for a cop to want to avoid being filmed?

For instance, certain organized crime and/or labor union groups will often threaten reprisals against individual cops who enforce the law against them. If you're a cop whose job it is to escort people across a particularly unruly picket line then I can see how you could reasonably object to being filmed.

No. It's never reasonable to prevent a record being made of the actions of a police officer.

In the case of undercover officers, it is reasonable in some cases to to hide the fact they are police officers.

I believe there are cases in which police may seek and should probably be granted the ability to obscure their identities, while still acting as uniformed officers, for specific operations. The Mexican police who took down a major drug lord recently all wore balaclavas and helmets in public, for this reason. This needs to be justified on a case by case basis or you will get abuse (like the cop who attacked Ian Tomlinson).

But in every case, their actions should be legal and legitimate. They should having nothing to hide.

While I agree that it should be allowed to tape any interactions you have with an officer, it's a bit of a gray area if you follow one around taping everything they do.

First: they are off duty sometimes (they get breaks too)

Second: They are dealing with other people, and that interaction deserves a level of privacy as well. If I follow a officer up to a car stop, and start recording, that seems intrusive.

So, the question is where the limit of permissible is. Do off duty police officers have normal citizen rights to prevent themselves from being taped? Do on break officers have that? How about on duty officers talking with another person? Can I record that audio? Video?

In my mind it should be more permissible than taking video of normal people, but a blanket "lets tape everything" doesn't work either. Where exactly the correct middle ground lies isn't clear to me.

Remember that police officers are still normal citizens, too, with the attendant rights and protections thereto. If you followed me personally around with a camera 24/7, that would be harassment. If you just followed me around 24/7 without a camera, that would be harassment. By "harassment" I don't mean necessarily that exact legal term but I'm sure there's some legal recourse if such a thing happened.

We don't necessarily need lots of "special" rights to film police, we just need them not to have special rights not to be filmed.

Organized crime AND/or labor groups? Really?

I'm not sure whether you're expressing surprise that I think they might sometimes be the same thing, or expressing surprise that I think they might sometimes not be the same thing.

Why isn't the cop getting sued or under any investigation? As far as I can see, he was plain clothed, in an unmarked car, no walkie talkie, no gear, a gun, and did not identify himself until after the third yell of "get off the bike".

I am not even sure that an off duty officer should be able to make a traffic stop. That creates a situation where people are expectant of it, which gives much more leverage to criminals who want to pretend to be police.

Now anyone can pull someone over and say they are a cop and most are going to take their word for it? This could prove to be the most calm and non violent form of car jacking I have heard of...

1) Approach person at a stoplight while out of breath 2) Ma'am, I need your car for official police business, get out, leave your belongings and the keys as they are. Contact the XXPD in 4 hours to retrieve your car. 3) Oh... Yes sir, thank you!

A great yet small win for possibly getting a chance to re-visit the original wire tapping laws that are being abused. However, there are other more superficial issues that are related directly to law enforcement that are seemingly going overlooked.

I can understand, as the guy is probably relieved to know he is not going to jail for 7 years, but hope that over time he will at least smell the cash he could possibly make; or more ideally, do it for the sake of doing the right thing for society.

I believe police officers, off-duty or not, have an obligation to step in when they see a potentially dangerous crime taking place. The gun may have been a little excessive, but after watching the video (and the motorcyclists stunts before being pulled over), I don't think the off-duty officer was acting out of line.

It's definitely a border case though. <internet-tough-guy>If I saw someone with a gun stepping out of an unmarked car I would run him over with my bike.</...>

And then you would wipe out because you don't "run over" things with motorcycles so much as you "wipe out over top of them..."

Good thing I don't have a motor cycle then ;-)

It's been done. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-CHdukO7to

There is a regular marked police car and uniformed officer behind the bike so that should have made it clear that the guy with the gun was also police, or perhaps a very stupid criminal.

When I was in high school, I was riding with a friend who was kind of a jackass. For some stupid reason, he flipped off some guys in a truck, who promptly started chasing us. Immediately behind them was a cop car. We ran into some traffic, had to stop, the grown men jumped out to kick our asses, and the pursuing police immediately asked them at gunpoint to get on the ground.

Just sayin, it happens.

so you understand the confusion then huh?

No, the "very stupid criminal" comment was just an attempt at humour. If you get stopped by two cars and one of them is a marked police car then it is obvious that the other car is also a police car.

hmm, I thought the marked car was behind him. I didn't see it the very end.

This has been a major issue recently, and Radley Balko of the libertarian-themed Reason magazine has done a great job covering the issue (from the pro-taping side, anyway), viz.:

http://reason.com/archives/2010/09/20/how-to-record-the-cops http://reason.com/blog/2010/09/14/cops-and-cameras http://reason.com/blog/2010/09/27/maryland-judge-tosses-the-...

EDIT: Radley, sorry.

*Radley

I'm pretty surprised the police department thought they could ever win this. The best interests of the public seem pretty clear cut here.

They didn't have anything to lose. And if they somehow managed to win, all the better for them.

Just bringing the case is intimidating enough. Even if it's legal, the fact that you might have to go to court to defend yourself will deter some people from filming them.

It is a personal hobby of mine to record cops in the off-chance anything happens. Usually it's stuff like driving on the median to get around a traffic jam (ugh) or parking in front of fire hydrants.

With the proliferation of camera phones, I think the world would be a better place if everyone pulled out cameras and started shooting as a matter of principal. I don't sympathize much with Rodney King, but the LAPD is more civilized (at least in public) since then.

Make sure you're prepared to lose your camera and get roughed up a bit if you decide to do this (which is admirable). In my experience, cops have no patience for people who assert their rights as citizens.

Many police cars nowadays are fitted with front-facing video cameras. One sage piece of advice from a friend of mine is to:

    * be extremely polite and cordial; "How may I help you officer?"
    * respond requests to be searched with, "Sir, I don't consent to 
      any searches"
    * When you step out of a vehicle, assume the position: legs 
      apart, hands behind your head.
    * Politely ask, "Am I free to go officer, or am I under arrest?"
      (repeatedly if necessary)

The point of this is to ensure that nothing you do can be possibly interpreted as an act of aggression by the officer, while asserting your rights. The police camera will show you in a pose of total submission, and any aggression on the part of the police officer will be unjustifiable.

The cop will be annoyed, but he won't touch you, and if he does, you will be vindicated. Your camera footage, OTOH, isn't guaranteed to survive a run-in with the cops (this happened to a friend of mine), and any natural reaction you might have to your camera getting snatched from your hands can be used as an excuse to whip out the tazer.

Remember HNers, the job of contemporary police is to arrest you, not to "serve and protect".

This American Life had a great show on this recently:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/r...

What you said is true, and that is my perspective on cop visits, too.

But for those life or death situations, Justin.tv offers smartphone apps that record directly to the web.

I wouldn't personally rely on the police camera to not get edited or lost before an important trial.

Your fears have been realized recently: http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Milford-cop-suspended-for...

I originally said "is known to" but I couldn't find the citation. Thanks for that.

> I don't sympathize much with Rodney King

Why not? He was beaten far beyond what was necessary to restrain and arrest him. I sympathize with him for what happened to him. It was a brutal assault.

He was drunk driving at over 100 miles per hour, didn't pull over for the cops, then he resisted arrest. No one deserves to be beaten up by the police unnecessarily, but he's not innocent in this.

If a criminally violent asshole beats up a criminally reckless asshole, I don't have sympathy for either one. The police were in the wrong, and Rodney King was also in the wrong. There's no sympathy to be had in the entire incident, not from me.

There's a huge difference here. Rodney King is one foolish idiot. The police are a massive, well funded (with our money) organization, with extraordinary powers. If Rodney King had continued to act is his idiotic manner, the consequences are vastly less than if the police continue to act outside the law, doing whatever they please.

This isn't a question of what's more disastrous for society. We're agreed on that. It's a question of sympathy, which is fundamentally a subjective question. I'm just giving my perspective.

Whether or not he was innocent has nothing to do with whether he deserves sympathy for being beaten within an inch of his life. There is no excuse for that kind of behavior from police.

You can be against police brutality without sympathizing with drunk driving morons like Rodney King just like you can be against the death penalty without sympathizing with murderous madmen like Charles Manson, or against political censorship without sympathizing with the Ku Klux Klan.

That's the essence of civil liberties--you don't have to be an object of sympathy or respect in order to have rights. You can be a common criminal, a mass murderer, or even a racist and you still have your rights, as well as plenty of people (you and me included) standing up for your rights even if on a personal level we wouldn't give you the time of day.

This sounds like a semantic issue demanding clarity; does one "not sympathise" with Rodney King specifically, particularly on account of the behaviour that triggered his arrest, or as a victim of a police beating?

It's, to me, a matter of justice versus the right to administer it. King certainly wasn't innocent and certainly deserved punishment, but democracy breaks down if punishment is ad-hoc. The LAPD has no right to beat down anyone who is submitting to arrest, or administer any sort of punishment to anyone except incarceration pending arraignment. "Rodney King was not innocent" is very different from "A jury has found Rodney King guilty by the same laws that apply to the rest of us, and may now be legally punished by the CDCR, in a manner proscribed by a judge."

That I don't sympathize is subjective on my part, in other words.

He may have actually been going faster. He was reported to be going 117mph. The LAPD's policy is to cut off chases at 120mph, as pursuit at that speed is considered more dangerous. I would not put it past the pursuing officers to fudge the numbers a bit here in order to continue the pursuit.

Incidentally, that's a large part of the reason I don't sympathize. It was unquestionably an abuse by the police to beat him, and I'm glad they caught hell, but I'm not going to shed a tear for the man. It's a travesty the way their trial went.

If this interests you, maybe you should see if there's a local Copwatch, or start one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copwatch

Well if they have nothing to hide they have nothing to fear ...

Or if they have nothing to hide, we have nothing to fear.

As a former co-worker of Anthony, I'm so happy the charges have been dropped. You couldn't meet a nicer guy. As much as I'd like to see this case continue to higher courts so it can set a higher precedent, I hope they don't appeal and Anthony can put this behind him.

An appeal seems unlikely given that the Attorney General's office issued their own opinion that recording an officer during a stop is legal under state law, but who knows?

This is a great ruling, but now the fight will shift to regulators. It may be another year or two, but I predict we'll see bills both at the state and national level restricting the recording of public servants.

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