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Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

You think cops are gonna get out a tape measure before arresting you for refusing to move back further? "8 feet" will be like 20+ feet.

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Cops unlawfully arrest people all the time for multitudes of reasons, but we have courts to deal with those cases of unlawful arrest.

It should be very clear from an officer's body cam whether the recording party is within 8 feet. That's a basic personal space amount of distance.

What if the body cam happened to be off, glitchy, or data was just lost on happenstance? What if even if the arrest was unlawful the victim already lost their job?

If a body cam happened to be off, then it doesn't matter whether a law like this is in effect or not.

It does affect you if the police can force you turn off your camera, or if they can later claim in court that video evidence of their transgressions were illegally obtained, and thus inadmissible.

And cops get away with harassing people all the time. The US courts have been doing an abysmal job of protecting the citizenry from police abuse. (E.g. qualified immunity.)

The thing that has been to some extent reversing that trend is cheap and ubiquitous video cameras.

The point of the law is to stop the people filming from tiny distances and getting in the way. You can definitely tell 3 feet for example.

There is already a law that makes it illegal to get in the way.

Maybe it’s not working? I’ve seen examples of people getting in the way a lot. There’s nothing wrong with making more specific laws targeting bad behavior.

If that’s the case, how do more laws fix an enforcement issue?

Raise awareness, make it easier to prosecute - vague laws are harder to convict on.

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