From the Left

/

Politics

Shooting Cop Videos? Be Nice

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

What if you happened to record video on your smartphone of a police officer as he shot an unarmed suspect in the back? What would you do with it?

That disturbing question faced Feidin Santana, the Dominican immigrant said on NBC's "Today Show," after he recorded police officer Michael Slager's fatal shooting of unarmed Walter Scott after a traffic stop in North Charleston, S.C.

Santana said he was so terrified that he thought about erasing the video. After all, good deeds like his sometimes get punished.

He might have been thinking, for example, of another highly publicized case: Ramsey Orta, who shot the video last August of Eric Garner who died in Staten Island, N.Y., during an arrest involving an alleged illegal choke hold.

A grand jury declined to indict the accused police officer but Orta was arrested shortly after the incident on a weapons charge and later on a drug charge. Orta accused the police of arresting him as payback for the Garner video. Too bad for him that he doesn't have video to back that charge up.

Yet his case and Santana's illustrate an important truth about today's cellphone video age: The right to record the cops is less clear than many people think it is.

So, for that matter, are some other important questions, such as the right to keep your video after you shoot it -- or the right of us, the public, to have access to video, whether it is shot by civilians or a police body camera.

Such questions have arisen with a new urgency since the racially fueled crisis in Ferguson, Mo., last year after Michael Brown was fatally shot by police officer Darren Wilson. As in the Staten Island and South Carolina cases, the killing of a black man by a white police officer turned a local tragedy into a national eruption of racial anger, fear, suspicion and resentment.

Yet, although no outcome will satisfy everybody, the existence of video led to a resolution of the South Carolina and Staten Island cases more quickly and decisively than in Ferguson. Rep. Jim Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat, among other African-American leaders, has urged young people to "keep your cellphones tuned up, keep the battery charged and don't hesitate to turn them on" if "that's what it's going to take for police officers to really think twice before pulling their weapons."

 

He's right, but civilians also should think twice as they pull out their cameras. Unlike the freedoms of speech and the press, for example, there is no explicit right to take pictures in the Constitution or much of anywhere else in the law.

Although legal opinions and attitudes have been moving slowly but strongly in favor of protecting a right to record, as Jeff Hermes, deputy director of the Media Law Resource Center told NPR's "On the Media," the legal battle is focusing increasingly on "what conditions restrictions can be placed on that right."

An important 2011 case known as Glik v. Cunniffe in the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that "though not unqualified, a citizen's right to film" law enforcement officers and other public officials on duty "is a basic, vital and well-established liberty safeguarded by the First Amendment."

Yet, as the court said, that right was "not unqualified." Police in the heat of the moment have confiscated cameras and even made arrests. Cameras have been returned with the important video images deleted, their owners have charged.

Civil libertarians, press freedom groups and new technologies are available to help civilian camera operators stay a step ahead of such shenanigans. New smartphone apps like Cop Watch automatically upload your recording to YouTube before police can erase it. Or the video can automatically be directed to the ACLU or other activist sites like Photography Is Not a Crime.

You also are advised to be courteous with the cops in such instances, announce that you are reaching for your phone and if an officer tries to stop you, don't resist. It is better to argue your case later in court than to court disaster now.

========

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)


(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

Comics

Adam Zyglis Al Goodwyn A.F. Branco Jimmy Margulies Clay Bennett Bob Gorrell