These days, there are cameras everywhere. From remote cameras that watch traffic lights to the video cameras on police dashboards and even the person of the cop, every interaction you have in public might be caught on video. However, don’t you DARE try to take video of the police, because if you turn a little of that Big Brother eye on them, it could cause you to be arrested.
These days, you can’t be too careful, and given how stupid police can behave once you give them a shield and a gun and the ability to basically ignore the law, then you’ve got good reason to capture all your interactions with police on tape. However, depending on where you live and the relative strength of your local police department when it comes to ignoring good sense, you might be at risk for extra charges on top of your speeding ticket if you do so. Are you willing to fight the fight? Some are; some aren’t.
At risk is the idea of a reasonable expectation of privacy. If you’re a cop, standing on the side of the road, having a conversation with a motorist while on dash-cam video, how could you possibly have an expectation of any privacy? Any REASONABLE person can see there’s NO expectation of private conversation when it’s all PUBLIC RECORD.
Hence, for once, I’m on the ACLU’s side, when their attorney David Rocah says something like, “It’s not that recording any conversation is illegal without consent. It’s that recording a private conversation is illegal without consent. So then the question is, ‘Are the words of a police officer spoken on duty, in uniform, in public a ‘private conversation.’ And every court that has ever considered that question has said that they are not.”
Image: Thomas Hawk
Tags: photography, police, video, taking pictures and video of police officers, surveillance, illegal wiretapping, cell phone video and wire tapping, police behaving badly, arrested for videotaping police, unusual arrests, law and order, crime and punishment