Know Your Rights – How to Respond When Police Tell You to Stop Filming

Something I wish I had more time to devote to here at Liberty Blitzkrieg is the topic of “know your rights.” Despite the establishment’s relentless assault on the Bill of Rights, the American citizen still enjoys more liberties than a large percentage of the world’s population. Nevertheless, as important as it is to have these rights, it is equally important to flex them. If we don’t constantly exercise our rights, they’ll ultimately fall victim to atrophy like a vestigial organ.

While the smartphone has proven an excellent tool for the surveillance state, its video function has conversely served as a powerful civil rights tool. So much so that police will often lie to citizens about their right to film them in public, and one State Representative from Texas went so far to try to ban the filing of police (see: Meet Jason Villalba – The Texas State Representative Who Introduced a Bill that Criminalizes Citizens Filming Police).

Despite all of that, it is completely legal to film police, and people should be doing it more often than they already are. For example, many of the criminal acts cops have been caught in over the past year were only proven without a shadow of a doubt due to citizen video evidence. The best recent example of this came in the case of the South Carolina man, Walter Scott, who was shot eight times in the back and killed as he ran away from a local cop. The officer claimed the man had taken his taser from him, but the video shows the cop planting the taser next to the dead man’s body after the killing. Watch the video here.

As mentioned earlier, cops will often try to intimidate ignorant citizens into putting away their phones. How to respond to this occurrence, as well as some other useful tips were outlined in a recent Atlantic article. Here are some excerpts:

“As a basic principle, we can’t tell you to stop recording,” says Delroy Burton, chairman of D.C.’s metropolitan police union and a 21-year veteran on the force. “If you’re standing across the street videotaping, and I’m in a public place, carrying out my public functions, [then] I’m subject to recording, and there’s nothing legally the police officer can do to stop you from recording.”

“What you don’t have a right to do is interfere,” he says. “Record from a distance, stay out of the scene, and the officer doesn’t have the right to come over and take your camera, confiscate it.”

Officers do have a right to tell you to stop interfering with their work, Burton told me, but they still aren’t allowed to destroy film.

Stanley wrote the ACLU’s “Know Your Rights” guide for photographers, which lays out in plain language the legal protections that are assured people filming in public. Among these: Photographers can take pictures of anything in plain view from public space—including public officials—but private land owners may set rules for photography on their property. Cops also can’t “confiscate or demand to view” audio or video without a warrant, and they can’t ever delete images.

“In the majority of situations, an officer is just trying to intimidate you, and stop your reporting. Once you make it clear to the officer that you do know what your rights are and that you don’t intend to be intimidated, I think in the vast majority of situations, the officer will back down,” he says.

And Stanley’s ACLU guide supplies the one question those stopped for taking photos or video may ask an officer:

If stopped for photography, the right question to ask is, ‘am I free to go?’ If the officer says no, then you are being detained, something that under the law an officer cannot do without reasonable suspicion that you have or are about to commit a crime or are in the process of doing so. Until you ask to leave, your being stopped is considered voluntary under the law and is legal.

“I’ve seen incidences where they’re verbally berating a community member and we show up on the scene and the entire scene switches,” he told me. But he also doubted that police-worn body cameras would change officer behavior.

Meanwhile, my adopted state of Colorado is well on its way of passing a law that empowers citizen-journalists further. From the Free Thought Project:

Denver, CO — A recently proposed bill in Colorado imposing legal penalties on police officers who interfere with citizens filming them could soon become law. The state’s House Of Representatives passed the bill this week, and it will now move on to vote in the Senate.

If it becomes law, the bill would reportedly require police officers to have someone’s consent or a warrant to physically take or destroy a persons camera or footage. If an officer violates this law, the victim would then be able to seek damages up to $15,000 plus attorney fees. This would also be the first law in the country that would guarantee civil damages to people who have their recording rights violated by police.

After passing in the House on Wednesday, Colorado House Bill 15-1290 will now make its way to the Senate for a final vote.

Lesson: Know your rights, film the police, and try to get similar bills to the one in Colorado passed in your home state.