This.

It should never, ever be a crime to tape or record police officers while they’re on duty. They’re public servants. They work for us. If they can use surveillance to monitor private citizens, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to use surveillance to monitor them. Again, this goes back to applying the same laws to the government that we apply to the people.

I’m working on a police corruption case right now where the guy on the receiving end of the corruption would be as good as dead were it not for the fact that he wised up to what was going on, and began wearing a wire for every interaction with the police. The “if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about” canard is indeed a canard when applied to private citizens. But when applied to people who work for us, to whom we’ve given an immense amount of power, and whom we’ve licensed to use deadly force, it’s perfectly applicable.

One of the recommendations in my paper is that every drug raid be videotaped. But it should go beyond that. It’s obscene for a citizen to be arrested for recording the actions of a police officer. Laws criminalizing the practice not only ought to be revoked, they should be replaced with laws codifying the right to record law enforcement, and forbidding the prosecution, intimidation, or seizure of the recording of the people who do it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 29th, 2006 at 5:38 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.