Federal Court Rules You Have The Right To Record The Police

Glenn Reynolds in the Examiner.

All over America, police have been arresting people for taking video or making sound recordings of them, even though such arrests are pretty clearly illegal. Usually, the charges are dropped once the case becomes public, and usually that’s the end of it.

But sometimes things go farther, and in two recent cases, they’ve gone far enough to bite back at the police and prosecutors involved. We need more such biting.

The first case comes from Barack Obama’s hometown of Chicago.

Tiawanda Moore had made a sexual harassment complaint against a Chicago patrolman. When she was visited by police Internal Affairs officers who tried to persuade her to drop the charge, she recorded the audio using her Blackberry. Though the audio reflected rather poorly on the Internal Affairs officers, the response of the Chicago state’s attorney was to act not against the offending officers, but against Ms. Moore, charging her with “wiretapping.”

After the tape was played, the jury took less than an hour to return a verdict of not guilty. “When we heard that, everyone (on the jury) just shook their head,” said one juror interviewed afterward. “If what those two investigators were doing wasn’t criminal, we felt it bordered on criminal, and she had the right to record it.”...

The U.S. Court of Appeals held that the right to record police officers in public is a “clearly established” part of the First Amendment's protections, and held the officers were thus not entitled to qualified immunity, meaning that they could be sued for their actions.

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