Arizona passes law criminalizing recording of police (within 8 ft) | Hacker News Reader

Arizona passes law criminalizing recording of police (within 8 ft)

usatoday.com

I cannot help to wonder how long it will take for the following scenario to play out.

1. Someone films the police from a distance. 2. The police moves closer, and either gets too close and arrests you. or.. 3. You start moving away from them, and they yell stop, and arrest you for trying to run from them, or for not complying.

I hope you guys fix whatever is going on in your country.

You forgot 4: you keep filming while they are far enough and stop when they get close to you. This way, you comply with the law, and you have enough material for court in case of misbehavior.

Sounds like you need multiple cameras, because misbehaviour will probably only happen once the cameras are off.

Yeah, so what? You filmed the beginning, you filmed the police asking you to stop: which judge will ever trust them when they'll describe how you slipped on a banana peel?

ehm... a few years I'd have laughed and said you're right. but today...

Cops already pull the “whoops my body cam stopped working” trick.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2018/06/28/...

By the policemen hole principle, with N+1 camera people spread out (over 16 ft apart) among N policemen, there is always one camera person that doesn't fit into a policeman's 8 ft vicinity.

that's gonna become a new very loose formation at political rallies. :|

By the way, from the article:

Exceptions were made for people at the center of an interaction with police, anyone standing in an enclosed structure on private property where police activity was occurring and occupants of a vehicle stopped by police as long as recording in those instances didn't interfere with police actions.

> as long as recording in those instances didn't interfere with police actions

They will immediately claim you are doing so.

"Stop interfering and/or resisting"

Accountability is widely considered interference by people who think they are or above the law.

You forgot step 4. They shoot the person and the police union protects them with a paid vacation

This is already a thing that happens, the difference is that now there will be a law allowing them to do it and reducing civil suit payouts

This is the predictable and obvious goal of the law: To give law enforcement an easy way to criminalize someone who is trying to hold them accountable. All the police have to do to arrest a photographer is suddenly run up within 8 feet of them. They can also now fan out in a cop-mesh, 8 feet from one another, so that nobody without a telephoto lens can get close enough to film their ill deeds.

There's already no shortage of ways to criminalize someone doing nothing illegal.

This isn't "your country," this is one state--one of fifty what-would-be-countries-in-Europe.

Well, it's our country's Supreme Court that has (incorrectly) decided to allow this kind of crap.

(Ofc they haven't yet okayed this one specifically, but everyone knows that they'll either allow this law or take a very long time to strike it down and refrain from punishing anyone allowed)

I mean if they just want to arrest you, they can just cite you for "disorderly conduct" or similar and take you in.

If they want to cite you for this law, you'd either have a recording to show the jury, or the cop would have to explain to the court why they cited you for recording them when there was no recording.

In short, this doesn't move the needle on bogus arrests and makes it clear at what distance you should be when recording the cops to avoid getting in their way, so it seems pointless to fight it.

4. You run away and they shoot you in the back.

To arrest you they have to move closer anyway, so, this complicated scenario is not even needed.

If a foreign country had a rogue police force that killed citizens and then passed a law criminalizing the recording of the police we'd easily call them a dictatorship.

Okay — but the US doesn’t have a “rogue police force that kills citizens”.

That’s not supported by actual statistics, even if it’s a popular narrative among some political groups.

Just do a google search and see actual events instead of some statistics.

Statistics seem to suggest just that though? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enfo...

What other statistic should I be looking at?

If you sort by: "People killed by security forces", out of the top 34 countries, 33 are underdeveloped or developing (and several are at war or have an ongoing civil war). The US is in 7th place.

Interestingly, Canada is the 35th, but it still has about 9 times fewer cases per capita than the US...

You should sort by “per capita”, where Canada has a third of US police per capita shootings.

Which makes sense, given the US’s problems with organized crime and drug trafficking — and a generally more armed society.

The math is off. Divide the deaths by the population, that column is wrong. Canada is actually at less than a third of that number, based on their own columns.

In virtually all of those, the shot attackers were armed themselves. Does stopping someone actively trying to kill a third-party make the police force "rogue"?

German police, all of them together, fired 62 shots, over the whole year, in 2019. In America that's just a regular traffic stop.

Something is very wrong with the American police/society/whatever, you can't deny that.

The difference is that here in Germany, our police officers don't have to fear that the person they're stopping is someone who is running drugs and already has two convictions, meaning any third conviction locks him up for life - so they can decide to simply shoot the cop and hope to get away versus a guaranteed life in prison [1].

Additionally, German police is training their people for ~2.5-3 years [2], whereas the US training is a couple of weeks at worst and a national average of 19 weeks [3].

The US needs to get a lot under control if it wants less police murders: they need to get rid of the absurd amounts of guns floating around, they need a drastic sentencing reform and the complete end of all three-strike policies, they (and fwiw, we too) need to end the "war on drugs", and they need to actually treat police training like any regular job education.

Unfortunately, getting the required majorities to fix all that is completely impossible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-strikes_law

[2] https://www.mit-sicherheit-anders.de/

[3] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/usa-kritik-an-ausbild...

> The difference is that here in Germany, our police officers don't have to fear that the person they're stopping is someone who is running drugs

Difference is that they do not except (that much) someone will have gun.

Only emphasizes the point, that there's something very wrong in the US.

Do you have a source for that number being a regular traffic stop? I find that highly unbelievable.

> Authorities have not said how many shots were fired [...] the number could be more than 90, with the man suffering at least 60 bullet wounds

https://nypost.com/2022/07/03/ohio-police-release-video-of-o...

Don't shoot at the cops.

Vouched for the sibling reply calling this misinformation because per the police chief himself (as of two days ago) Jayland Walker was unarmed.

> https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/03/us/akron-police-shooting-...

Go back and read the article I responded to. It says he shot at police during the pursuit and there is a picture of the gun found in the car. It was reasonable given the circumstances to assume he was armed when he turned and they opened fire.

Fair enough, if you believe extrajudicial execution is a fair punishment for any crime committed earlier there's no point in my arguing further.

This will be abused by cops against first amendment auditors especially. This will also be challenged in and hopefully force the courts to answer the legality of recording law enforcement in any capacity instead of leaving it in limbo like they have now.

While police can enforce a perimeter in the course of police work, specifically outlawing recording will be/should be struck down as unconstitutional.

> specifically outlawing recording

That is not the point of the law. The point is to stay out of the immediate proximity to the action.

That's an interpretation of the law. Another, and more likely interpretation of the law is that the purpose is to prevent people from recording abusive police interactions to stymie reforms of law enforcement practices and to prevent victims of police abuses from seeking justice.

There's a reason it's the "legal code"

It doesn't care what "the point of the law" is. It cares what's written.

It's already illegal to interfere. Now there's a magic line in which you can't get too close regardless of if you interfere or not.

What if my 14 YO son wanders off, and is now being questioned? I have to choose between engaging with the police officer ("my son is a minor, and you don't have permission to question him") and recording the interaction.

What if my friend and I are stopped, and they are getting questioned? I now have to turn away, and potentially escalate the situation by looking like I'm running, to record the interaction.

What if the police officer unexpectedly pulls a gun on my husband, and the officer is right beneath my unenclosed porch? I have to leave my house to reposition myself so I can record, potentially missing the critical 30 seconds.

Then make a law requiring people to stay out of proximity to the action. Don't make a law against recording police.

Under which amendment?

The first... It covers journalism and reporting

For more details, https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/first-amendment-center... . This is probably the most specific:

> Photographing or more commonly videotaping police activity is one of the most contentious areas of photographer/videographer rights. When it comes to filming police activity, the federal courts are not in agreement as to whether there is even a right to do it. In a case about prisoner punishment, the U.S. Supreme Court said, “For a constitutional right to be clearly established, its contours must be sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates that right … in the light of pre-existing law the unlawfulness must be apparent.” Hope v. Pelzer (2002)

> Two U.S. Circuit courts, the 1st and the 11th, say that there is a right to photograph/videotape police activity. The 9th Circuit provides some protection if police activity is considered a “matter of public interest.” Courts in the 3rd, 4th and 5th Circuits have said that the right to videotape the police has not conclusively been established. Courts in the remaining circuits have not ruled directly on the issue.

AZ is in the 9th circuit:

> In its 1995 opinion in Fordyce v. City of Seattle, the 9th Circuit stated that there is a First Amendment right to “film matters of public interest.” ...

> The question of whether a person has the right to photograph or videotape police activities in the 9th Circuit has not been directly addressed and, thus, has not been fully answered.

>For a constitutional right to be clearly established, its contours must be sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates that right

I always thought that reporting on the government was the entire literal point of the first amendment covering journalism and reporting

That part of it deals with qualified immunity for violating a constitutional right. Here's the opinion: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/01-309.ZO.html .

Does that mean that US police officers don't know the amendments of the constitution? I knew they weren't required to know the law, but to not know the basic amendments seems absolutely insane

It sounds to me like police have carte-blanche to do whatever they want with zero regard for actual laws

The 1st amendment is not absolute. There are well-known time/place/manner restrictions, copyright and libel restrictions, and more.

Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity:

> qualified immunity is a legal principle that grants government officials performing discretionary (optional) functions immunity from civil suits unless the plaintiff shows that the official violated "clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known".

From the link I gave, "The question of whether a person has the right to photograph or videotape police activities in the 9th Circuit has not been directly addressed and, thus, has not been fully answered. ... Courts in the 3rd, 4th and 5th Circuits have said that the right to videotape the police has not conclusively been established."

Since these are not "clearly established statutory or constitutional rights", the police officer has qualified immunity.

That all said, you've nailed it on the head. 'Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has noted a "disturbing trend" of siding with police officers using excessive force with qualified immunity,[45] describing it as "sanctioning a 'shoot first, think later' approach to policing".' , quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity#Police_brut...

This definitely would not pass constitutional muster. It's been clearly established that if it's happening in public, it's fair game. Furthermore, I'd imagine the onus would be on the Police to affirmatively prove that the person is interfering - they couldn't just say "you're interfering with me, turn it off". This is a horrible law.

From the article:

> Violators could face a misdemeanor, but only after being verbally warned and continuing to record anyway. > Exceptions were made for people at the center of an interaction with police...

They are working, you are not involved, they ask you to not interfere, you cannot be bothered to move a couple yards, and the constitution should worry about you?

> This is a horrible law.

No, this is just prejudice on your side or lack of reading comprehension... or of reading at all.

what a bootlicking understanding of cop behavior

>> Violators could face a misdemeanor, but only after being verbally warned and continuing to record anyway. > Exceptions were made for people at the center of an interaction with police...

> They are working, you are not involved, they ask you to not interfere, you cannot be bothered to move a couple yards, and the constitution should worry about you?

Everything you just detailed has just as much relevance to people who are not recording. Why do you think the law called out recording within that radius?

It's clearly in violation of the 1st amendment.

> and the constitution should worry about you?

Yes.

You have a right to bear arms , but yet states keep passing restrictions. How is this any different?

Guns are used to murder people, phones and cameras are not effective physical weapons.

While I agree with you, we have had a lot of "free speech/the constitution isn't absolute" talk lately. I sort of hope a court upholds this to teach that crowd the error of their ways.

This law will be abused by officers and abused hard. Also, how long before this gets picked up by other states?

> This law will be abused by officers and abused hard.

How, if they are recorded from further away?

How far away was the Floyd recording?

Five, ten feet.

How would you envision this abused (worse than what we have now?)?

Far as I look at it, codifies where you CAN be. Presently, you couldn’t get that close up for an arrest for a variety of reasons in practice.

Seeing as I, a mere coder, don’t want people “over my shoulder” it is only reasonable and fair for a similar affordance.

I'll ask the opposite, how could you NOT see this being abused?

As YouTube shows, there are plenty of police officers who hate when bystanders film, and retaliate at every chance.

Now all they have to do is run up on you and arrest you for being within a 8 foot proximity? They are going to love it.

The police officer is also capable of moving. If I'm filming 20 feet away, he only has to take a few steps and suddenly I'm violating the law and he can arrest me.

There are plenty of cases where filming a police officer was used to show that the police officer was breaking the law and not the citizen. This includes some of the high profile cases where police brutality killed innocent people.

If you are out in a position of power, you shouldn’t have any expectation of privacy, especially when there’s a history of that power being abused.

the police will walk towards the person filming to threaten and arrest them, it’s already fairly common for police to get uncomfortably close to someone to encourage pushing

Do you, a mere coder, have both the means and the history of killing innocent people?

Yes, many developers write shitty software that has results in human fatalities. For example: the vertical over correction written into the Boeing 737 that resulted in two aircraft crashes killing hundreds of people.

Then perhaps, there should be someone looking over your shoulder.

Don't forget the steady stream of ransomware infestations and credit card dumps. We know how to write safe software, NASA and Dr Richard Hipp have proved that it can be done, but we choose not to because there are no consequences. Consequently, all continues as before.

Mere coders do not embody the state monopoly on violence. So your comparison is nonsense.

This is a case of 'who watches the watchers', not 'who watches the coders'.

The coding equivalent is saying that auditors cannot look at the code nor the server settings, that they need to trust you.

The new law has legalized an existing abuse - police threatening concerned observers who are recording - so I suppose you could say it's no longer abuse. Compelling stuff!

1. Cops are not immovable objects, they can move closer to someone who is recording and arrest them.

2. You are not an agent of the state exercising a monopoly on violence when you’re writing code.

As a mere coder, your not granted extraordinary power to stop, arrest, and kill with little risk of legal repercussions. Anyone granted such power should be on camera the entire time they are working and any laws they break, on the job or off, should require maximum sentence be served. They should be held to a much higher standard then anyone else. They’re not even held to the standard of mere coders, who absolutely can be monitored legally, regardless of any courtesy they may expect.

The police are granted tremendous power by the state. They have the authority to use their sole judgement to kill citizens on US soil. This is a power granted to virtually no other group. As such, it is absolutely critical that this power not be abused and we should therefore have strong systems of state and citizen oversight over police behavior. That's the bargain. We give the police guns and let them kill people but the cost is that we get to watch them like hawks.

I agree with your characterization. It's often described as a monopoly on force. States, counties, and cities all have the right to use force to injure or kill you. "With great power comes great responsibility." Civilized societies need police forces (not everyone is a rational actor) but we should nearly always err on the side of mistrusting the police when it comes to policies and laws. People should become police understanding that they will be under the microscope at all times. That's the price they should pay for wielding firearms, forcing compliance, and the ability to arrest people.

Just because laws might be broken or abused, that's not a good enough reason not to have laws. This law is meant to lower the temperature in situations that are already stressful enough without someone getting in the cop's face with their phone. If you can video an arrest from 10 feet away, that's good enough. Also, any cops abusing this law will still be recorded doing it.

One problem is that voices obey the inverse square law; the received power of the audio will be inversely proportional to the square of distance. The new minimum distance will often be enough to prevent capturing their words, with the direct consequence that recordings will not be able to capture what is said. They become less accountable.

The law is meant to give police a pretense to arrest people recording them and give them plausible deniability; eg "looks like I misjudged the distance". Meanwhile people were still arrested which is a punishment with consequences in of itself. That's in the best case where the charges are dropped, worst case is they have prove it in court with all the associated burdens and costs. Even if they get off, that's still a punishment. And for what? This law isn't needed for any other reason, police already have the authority to clear an area they are working in.

It's a shame that it will probably take many people getting caught up in this law over multiple years before it's thrown out as blatantly unconstitutional.

So technically now police have authority to escalate any encounter with a Tesla driver into an arrest, since they can't stop the car from recording?

This is purely a Pyrrhic victory. The courts have already ruled that filming police is protected by the First Amendment. It doesn’t matter whether you’re 8 feet or 20 feet. You can film them. Someone will challenge this, they will get arrested, it will go to court, and a judge will slap it down. This really is overblown.

Lol, ya, you have a lot more trust in our court system than you should.

I have more faith in the court system than our politicians. In my humble opinion, politicians hate making hard decisions, so they hope that the courts will intervene.

Depends on the judge and on the political environment. There are many laws out there that boldly violate the bill of rights, yet breaking those laws has been a felony for decades.

This is radical forgive me, but I think if there are laws out there that boldly violate the Bill of Rights, then it’s our duty to challenge those laws.

I really hope someone challenges Arizona’s law, and continues to film police. Unfortunately the vast majority of people cannot afford to be arrested, to fight their arrest, and prevail in court.

> if there are laws out there that boldly violate the Bill of Rights, then it’s our duty to challenge those laws.

Yes, but I don't see your attitude meshing well with people who actually do the challenging in practice. They are wizened by their struggles and those of us on the sidelines should pay attention to their reality.

This isn’t unconstitutional:

You have a right to film public happenings, but not to interfere with police. Arizona has codified that inside 8ft of active police work is “interfering”.

https://www.azleg.gov/legtext/55leg/2R/bills/HB2319S.pdf

That doesn't make it right and it doesn't make it constitutional. AZ has been full of more hot air than Chicago lately.

I am not so sure about this with the current Supreme Court. They seem to be quite selective with where they are strict constitutionalists and where they aren’t.

https://www.azleg.gov/legtext/55leg/2R/bills/HB2319S.pdf

This is a stupid law. If the concern is that people may interfere with police work then it shouldn’t matter if they are recording or not.

One step closer to a failed police state. Yay.

This would be a "crime" in AZ now?

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/11/1005601724/darnella-frazier-t...

I wonder if you could use an autonomous drone that will always keep a distance and film the interaction.

Drones are not allowed by law in most public places

That doesn't stop many drone operators from flying them in parks, on mountains, or over residential areas for kicks. Law enforcement routinely fly drones over entire cities to obtain location and surveillance data without a warrant. I don't see your point.

I don't think this law was even needed given the Fraiser v Evans case that SCOTUS refused to hear.

https://www.theusconstitution.org/litigation/frasier-v-evans...

As it stands right now, if you film the cops, they can take your device, delete the video, and be protected by qualified immunity.

this won't stand : just everyone wearing an Axon3 bodycam would violate the law but not be detectable without undue search.

Not the way I would fix police brutality cases.

Making it illegal to film and report police brutality cases should see a signicant reduction in the number of police brutality cases (being reported).

This law doesn’t make it illegal. It says keep your distance and not interfere which in many cases makes the situation worse

Land of the free

Good first step. Now can we criminalize being within 8ft of the US Capitol?

I'm curious what it is you're actually trying to say.

Atrocious. Which party dominates Arizona government?

Both houses are split about 50-50

ballotpedia says you're wrong: "The Republican Party controls the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature."

What's the split?

I don't know, but a Republican majority means the split doesn't matter since they vote en bloc almost all the time now.

DVs can bite down. Repubs own this.

How would programmers like it if folks had a camera in your face a foot away from you while you’re doing you’re coding away. This is a good law. You can still film - bit don’t interfere with the cop’s job which is hard enough already

There are already laws about not interfering with an active crime scene. This is an additional law that says that interference is simply standing with a phone within 8 feet, which I find to be lol nah.

Besides, programmers already have cameras less than a foot away when coding. Productivity trackers aren’t illegal!

Cool, so I can film the cops closer than 8 feet if I'm just auditing their productivity? Thanks, internet lawyer!

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