Quote:A new bill in the Florida House of Representatives would make it illegal to approach a cop within 30 feet if the officer warns the person not to do so, effectively criminalizing the filming of law enforcement at any close proximity.


The legislation, filed by Rep. Alex Rizo (R–Hialeah), would make it unlawful to "interrupt, disrupt, hinder, impede, or interfere" with a police officer within that radius. It would also criminalize "indirect[] harass[ment]." Whether or not someone crosses that line would be up to the discretion of the officer, and would be punished by a $500 fine and up to 60 days in jail.

It is beyond debate that the public has a constitutional right to film police on the job. "There is a long line of First Amendment case law from the high court that supports the right to record the police," notes the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for digital rights. "Federal appellate courts in the First…Third, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits have directly upheld this right."


One such ruling: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruled that Denver cops violated a man's First Amendment rights in 2014 when they surrounded him, confiscated his tablet without a warrant, and attempted to delete footage he took of the group beating a man during an arrest. (In a maddening turn, the officers still received qualified immunity and thus couldn't be sued over the incident, because the exact way the situation played out had not been carved into a previous court ruling.)

"It's hard to see such a blanket ban as anything but a targeted assault on First Amendment activity," says Ari Cohn, a First Amendment lawyer who works at TechFreedom, a think tank dedicated to technology issues. "Cops have long tried claiming that the act of filming them in itself obstructs their ability to do their job…and now that this argument failed, they are rather transparently trying to create a safe space from observation by the people they are sworn to serve."

House Bill 11 seeks to circumvent the Constitution, giving Florida officers a weapon to shut down public documentation under the guise of "harassment" that, as stated in the bill, does not have to be "direct." It remains unclear what would qualify as indirect harassment, though filming seems like a good candidate.

Rod Skirvin, president of the Broward County Police Benevolent Association, a law enforcement union, told the local ABC affiliate that "there is [no] problem with recording the police." There is a caveat in his view: "I don't think you should get in their face to do it."

Yet there is a distinction between a 30-foot distance and actually getting in an officer's face. That difference could easily determine whether or not someone is able to get any video of the cop whatsoever—a First Amendment-protected activity. Should a bystander choose to physically interact with a cop, the state can take comfort in the fact that assault is already illegal.

"A blanket 30 foot no-approach zone is completely unmoored from any government interest in ensuring that citizens don't obstruct police operations—that would prevent someone from standing across a typical street from a police officer!" adds Cohn. "That is a profound threat to the First Amendment. If the police don't want to be filmed or observed, they should get out of the public service field."

Police departments are notoriously opaque when it comes to sharing details on incidents that may or may not be laden with misconduct. None is more notorious than the Minneapolis Police Department's statement on the death of George Floyd, which acquitted then-Officer Derek Chauvin of any wrongdoing and cast it as a "medical incident." Bystander filming on the scene told a different story, and Chauvin has since been convicted of Floyd's murder.

Quote:Nassau County Passes Bill That Could Make Criticizing a Cop Punishable by $50,000


Police officers have difficult jobs, and, in some sense, are charged with protecting the public's right to free speech. It is with that in mind that the local legislature in Nassau County, New York, has passed a bill that could serve to limit the First Amendment rights of those who criticize cops.


"It is the judgment of this Legislature that the recent widespread pattern of physical attacks and intimidation directed at the police has undermined the civil liberties of the community at large," reads proposed local law No. 2021, introduced by Legislator Joshua A. Lafazan, an Independent. "Such violence is therefore a direct assault on the rule of law, every bit as much as suppression of speech by public authorities." 

It would appear the irony was lost on the legislators who voted in favor of the bill, which would make police officers a protected class and allow them to sue those who "harass, menace, assault or injure an individual due to such individual's status as a first responder." A police officer who feels aggrieved under the law would be able to commence civil action for compensatory and punitive damages. Anyone found in violation would be subject to an additional $25,000 penalty, which would double if the alleged offender acted out during a riot.


The bill pays a great deal of lip service to violence against police officers, which is something that should indeed be a crime, and, thankfully, already is. That "harassment" of police officers would now merit a $50,000 civil penalty raises a few red flags. For one, the charge is inherently vague. And just how expensive should it be to criticize the government, the entity both charged with protecting free speech and constrained by it?

That cost should be zero, says Ken White, an attorney at the law firm Brown White and Osborn, who tweets under the popular Twitter account "Popehat." "It's basically a threat that, if you protest, not only are things going to happen to you, but now there could be litigation against you," he says. "The record of these types of hate crime provisions shows that they tend to be used abusively by police."

Hate crime laws have indeed engendered a great deal of opposition, primarily from conservatives, who say that such special protections should not be afforded to the litany of minority groups that demand them, including people of color and the LGBT community. And there are many valid reasons to agree with them, as hate crime laws subjectively deem certain biases more egregious than others, effectively undercutting equality under the law.

Yet that hasn't disabused some right-leaning types from supporting the protections for cops. Consider the action taken by the Alabama House of Representatives, which last year passed a bill designating police officers as a protected class under hate crime legislation.

Nassau County is not the first legislature to float speech-restrictive laws aimed at protecting the government from reproach. As I wrote last week, the Florida House of Representatives is considering a bill that would make it a crime to "indirectly harass" a police officer by getting closer than 30 feet while he or she is on the job. That would effectively make filming a cop illegal, which is without question protected by the First Amendment.

"This is just sheer base-pleasing gesturing by the legislators doing this," says White. "They say it's required because they're being assaulted. Well, let me tell you, I've never seen a situation where actual assaults of cops are not vigorously prosecuted, and if anything, they're prosecuted too easily and questionably. This is really trying to deter speech against cops that might hurt the most delicate person's feelings."

Perhaps most ironic is the bill's passage as the country debates qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that prohibits the public from suing police officers over constitutional rights violations unless the way in which a cop misbehaved has been outlined in a previous court precedent with a sort of painstaking precision. Under qualified immunity, cops have been protected from lawsuits for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars, damaging an innocent man's home with explosives during a SWAT raid gone wrong, shooting a child, and killing a man who had been asleep in his car. So while the officers who hold a monopoly on state power in Nassau County are entitled to the benefit of the doubt—and then some—it would seem the public is not.

Quote:[color=var(--print_on_web_bg_color, #1a1a1a)]Marsy's Law was supposed to help victims. In Jacksonville, it shields police officers.
[color=var(--print_secondary, var(--print_secondary_on_web_bg_color, var(--print_secondary, #757575)))]Last week, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office scrubbed police-shooting videos from its transparency website.[/color]
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Last week, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office scrubbed police-shooting videos from its transparency website.

Uriel J. García 10 hr ago
In late May, three Jacksonville police officers and a state agent shot and killed a 37-year-old man wanted on a warrant. More than two weeks earlier, two Jacksonville officers shot a 29-year-old man also wanted in connection to a robbery. 

Police released the names and ages of those injured and killed, and police announced that those men had fired first. Yet Jacksonville police never released the names of the officers, leaving the public in the dark about which officers fired their weapons.

Earlier this year, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office started withholding the names of police officers who have shot people after January 2019, scrubbing any previous mention of officers’ names from the office’s documents.

The office also began removing bodycam videos of past police shootings from their transparency website last week. It has not yet answered questions about when it plans to republish the videos.

The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office has posted video from only one shooting, while the office now says 23 other shooting videos are “pending” further redaction. Those pending cases stretch as far back as three years.

Read: JSO's slow release of body-cam

Of the 100 times Jacksonville officers have shot at a person since July 2015, the Sheriff's Office website identifies 36 by name. The remaining 64 names have been kept hidden from the public. 

Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams’ office, like others across Florida, has cited a new court ruling that said police officers who fear harm are victims and qualify to have their names kept confidential, even if they shoot or kill someone, under Marsy’s Law, a constitutional amendment approved by the state’s voters in 2018.

The Sheriff's Office has treated every single police officer who has shot someone since January 2019 — 59 in total — as a victim and kept their names secret.

Marsy's Law is meant to keep private the names and other personal information of crime victims. And since 2008, a total of 14 states’ voters have approved the law by a ballot initiative. (Two states’ supreme courts ruled their states’ initiatives unconstitutional, and a third state amended its law after its passage led to unforeseen consequences.)

Christina Kittle, an organizer with the advocacy group Jacksonville Community Action Committee, said police are using the law to avoid accountability.

“It’s just frustrating knowing that a law created to protect crime victims is being used to take away accountability from police. That’s the opposite of transparency. It’s a step backward,” she said. “We hear from their side all the time that not all cops are bad. So, at what point do we get to have the tools to distinguish that.” 

In some cases, like the two in May, police said they shot suspects who had pulled a weapon. But in some cases, the Sheriff’s Office made no such claim, saying the suspects shot by officers were unarmed or even running away when officers shot at them.

In four cases, the Sheriff’s Office said those they shot had no weapons or just “hands/fist/feet/teeth/etc.” In a fifth case, the alleged weapon was a police Taser.

Even where officers were found to violate office policy in two cases, those officers’ names weren’t released. Those cases involved officers who shot but didn’t hit suspects, in a shooting in July of 2019 and a shooting in July of 2020, and both shootings were referred to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office internal affairs.

The office is still not releasing the names of those officers, but a Tributary database compiled before the Sheriff’s Office scrubbed their names revealed they were Clifford Sames and Bryce Mrakovich respectively.

The Tributary is releasing its database, which names Jacksonville officers who have shot someone from 2007 through 2020, at https://tinyurl.com/JSOshootings.

The Trib: JSO Police-Shooting Database

The Sheriff’s Office extended these Marsy’s Law protections, retroactively making officers’ names secret, regardless of whether the officer was actually a victim, so that the office could review each case before re-releasing the names.

“We had to immediately do it. We have to remove their names,” said spokesman Officer Christian Hancock who said he’s been tasked with reviewing each shooting and asking officers if they feel they were victims. “Is it important to get that done? Yes. Is it at the top of my list every single day? No.”

Going forward, he said, police must document how they were victims through an incident or arrest report. “I can’t just say Andrew was not a nice guy and pushed me. I have to be listed as a victim of a crime.”

If an officer is considered a victim, then his or her name will also be redacted from internal-affairs and administrative reviews of a shooting, Hancock said.

Hancock didn’t give an estimate of how long it will take to finish reviewing past shootings.

Marsy’s Law's proponents sold it to Floridians, like in other states, as a way to protect the privacy of crime victims. Still, lawyers warned that the law could harm transparency efforts and that police departments would use it to limit the release of information.

Law-enforcement officials say that if an officer needs to use their weapons, they should be considered victims too. But transparency advocates and some criminal justice experts say police departments are misusing the law to hide information from the public. 

“It’s another way of keeping officers above the law,” said Kami Chavis, a law professor at Wake Forest University and former assistant U.S. attorney. “If it were anyone else taking a life their pictures and names are in the evening news.”

Last summer, prompted by the murder of George Floyd, people demonstrated across the country, demanding that police stop killing people and that they be held accountable when they do.

Support The Tributary

In response, some police departments took steps toward implementing policies to be transparent in deadly force cases. Yet, in Florida a different debate started: Should police officers who kill people on duty be thought of as victims and have their names kept secret from the public? 

The largest police union in the state says yes. Police reform and transparency advocates say no. Regardless, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office and the State Attorney’s Office will comply with the law as they interpret it, which is to shield the names of officers in police shooting cases.

In effect, due in large part to Marsy's Law, Jacksonville police shootings are less transparent than ever.

“Not releasing the identities of crime victims, citizens and police officers alike, has nothing to do with transparency,” Hancock said. “It is a constitutional amendment that is afforded to all victims of crime.”

Not all police officers however support the interpretation of the law.

Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri wrote in court documents that Marsy’s Law should not hide the name of police officers who have killed someone.

“That a use of force is justified does not shield the identity of the person using it from public view,” he wrote in a court filing in May. “Here, the appeals court misconstrued the plain test of Marsy’s Law by expanding it to suppress the identity of a police officer who shot and killed another person.”

Virginia Hamrick, a staff attorney with the First Amendment Foundation of Florida, said the state’s public records laws and victim-protection laws can co-exist.

“There can be privacy protections for victims of crime, and I think there can also be accountability for officers who use deadly force.” 

The law also had other unintended consequences, said Hamrick, the lawyer for the First Amendment Foundation. She said that police have also used Marsy’s Law to withhold information of where a crime has occurred because officers have considered buildings as victims.

“The way the amendment was marketed, it didn’t discuss this at all. So I don’t know where this came from,” she said. “This was not the point of the law at all when the amendment was up for a vote.”

The amendment had support across party lines and one of its biggest proponents was state Sen. Lauren Book, a Democrat from Broward County. But she introduced legislation that would have clarified the constitutional provision so that police departments could not use the constitutional amendment to shield officers' names. Her bill failed.

Book’s office said she will continue to push for new legislation re-interpreting the amendment.

“After seeing news about misapplications of the law, Senator Book has again put legislation into drafting to prevent public employees who carry weapons from using Marsy’s Law in cases where their state-issued or approved weapon is discharged in the line of duty,” her office said in a statement.

Hamrick’s organization is arguing in favor of publicly releasing the names of two officers in a lawsuit between the city of Tallahassee and the Florida Police Benevolent Association, the state’s largest police union. 

In two separate incidents two officers fatally shot two men, Tony McDade, a Black trans man, and Wilbon Cleveland Woodard, another Black man. The officers say they felt threatened, making them victims, the Florida Police Benevolent Association argued in a lawsuit against the city of Tallahassee, which had said the officers’ names were exempt from Marsy’s law.

The Second Judicial Circuit Court agreed with the city, ruling the law “was not intended to apply to law enforcement officers when acting in their official capacity.”

The union appealed, and in April, a three-judge panel in the First District Court of Appeals unanimously reversed the lower court’s ruling. “That the officer acts in self-defense to that threat does not defeat the officer’s status as a crime victim,” wrote Judge Lori Rowe.

The First Amendment Foundation and news organizations have appealed the latest ruling to the state Supreme Court.

Officials with the Florida Police Benevolent Association didn’t respond to a request for comment and the lawyer representing the union in court declined to comment. But, the union’s president told WLRN he hopes the Florida Supreme Court does not hear the case.

As it stands now, the only time police will release the name of an officer who has shot someone but claims to be a victim is if prosecutors criminally charge the officer for unjustifiably killing or injuring someone.

Frank D. LoMonte, professor and director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at University of Florida, said another way the names of officers could become public is if someone files a civil rights lawsuit against an officer who injured or killed a person.

“It's pretty routine to file a Defendant John Doe lawsuit and then make the opponent disclose the information to you under subpoena,” he said. “This happens all the time when people are victimized by government employees whose names they don't know, like a person who's shot with a rubber bullet or tear-gassed. So ultimately the name will end up becoming public anyway if there's a lawsuit.”

Quote:A BLACK MAN CALLED THE COPS NAZIS–AND WAS CHARGED WITH A HATE CRIME

A Pennsylvania hate crime statute is being used by law enforcement to punish angry arrestees.


Tempers can flare during an arrest, leading some people to say ill-advised and even cruel things.



But, where does protected speech end and criminal speech begin?



That line is being blurred by police in Pennsylvania who are using the state’s hate crime statute called ethnic intimidation—defined as “malicious intention toward the race, color, religion or national origin of another individual or group of individuals”—against people who direct vitriol at them.



On Sept. 23, 2016, Robbie Sanderson, a 52-year-old Black man from North Carolina, was arrested for retail theft in Crafton, a small town near Pittsburgh.



During the arrest, Sanderson called police “Nazis,” “skinheads” and “Gestapo,” according to an affidavit of probable cause filed by the Crafton Borough police.



For that, he was charged with a hate crime.



“This is completely ridiculous,” said Mary Catherine Roper, deputy legal director for the ACLU of Pennsylvania. “This is not what the hate crime statute was for. This is criminalizing pure speech and that violates the First Amendment.”



It all began that late September day when the police responded to a CVS Pharmacy for a possible active burglary, according to the police affidavit.



A passing motorist called police to say that she saw an older black man pulling on the rear doors of the store.



The store was open at the time, but when police arrived they found no one at the rear so they went inside.



Police then spoke with a CVS employee who identified Sanderson as the man pulling on the store’s doors; the employee told the police that the man was at the cashier station.



The police approached Sanderson by the cash registers, detained him, and searched his backpack, according to the affidavit. Inside the backpack, police allegedly found a little more than $100 worth of stolen merchandise, including beef jerky and Dr. Scholl’s shoe inserts.



After Sanderson called the police derogatory names, the affidavit states, he also told them “that’s why motherfuckers are killing y’all out here” and “all you cops just shoot people for no reason.”



And police said that Sanderson told one officer, Brian Tully, that he was going to find his wife and have sex with her.



Tully then charged Sanderson with summary retail theft for allegedly stealing the items from the CVS, as well as misdemeanor terroristic threats, institutional vandalism and resisting arrest for incidents that occurred during the arrest, according to court records.



Sanderson was also charged with “felony ethnic intimidation”—Pennsylvania’s hate crime statute—for making angry comments to the police.



Roper of the ACLU told The Appeal that ethnic intimidation is supposed to be used only when an underlying crime like making terroristic threats or simple assault is motivated by a bias or hatred of race, ethnicity, or religion. It is not supposed to be used merely because a defendant made racially driven remarks around the time of an incident if the underlying offense was not motivated by such bias.



“Where the underlying crime is shoplifting or the underlying crime is resisting arrest,” Roper explained, “none of that is motivated by ethnic bias.”



The grading of an offense—whether it is a felony or a misdemeanor—is based on the grading of the underlying offense.



So, by definition, ethnic intimidation increases the penalty for a crime by making the grading one step higher than the underlying alleged bias-motivated offense.



In Sanderson’s case, police claimed the terroristic threats charge was bias-motivated. That offense is graded as a first-degree misdemeanor, meaning the ethnic intimidation charge Sanderson faced was then upgraded to a third-degree felony.



Sanderson is not the only Pennsylvania resident to face ethnic intimidation charges for what appears to be simply making comments to the police that could be considered racist. The Appeal identified at least three other such cases in the state in 2016.



In January that year, Sannetta Amoroso, a 43-year-old Black woman from Pittsburgh, was charged with multiple counts of first-degree felony ethnic intimidation by McKees Rocks police Officer Brandy Harcha. According to police, Amoroso became angry while trying to report a crime and said “I’m going to kill all you white bitches” and “death to all you white bitches.”



Then in June, Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Robert Wareham charged Steven Ray Oller, 47, of Chambersburg, with misdemeanor ethnic intimidation for threatening officers and using a racial slur directed at a Latinx trooper during an arrest for suspected DUI.



And in August, Trooper James Welsh of the state police charged Seneca Anthony Payne, a 39-year-old Bucks County man, with misdemeanor ethnic intimidation. Payne allegedly called an officer a “Gandhi ************” during a welfare check at Payne’s home.



Despite filing such charges, in 2016 these departments reported to the Pennsylvania State Police Uniform Crime Reporting System that no hate crimes occurred in their jurisdictions.



“What you have is police officers essentially punishing people for disrespect to police officers by adding on criminal charges,” Roper explained. “And that’s just inappropriate. The things they are saying are deeply offensive, but they are not criminal.”



Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ethnic intimidation charge was later dropped in all four cases, including Sanderson’s, according to court records.



Sanderson pleaded guilty to retail theft and resisting arrest and was sentenced to one year probation and ordered to pay $915 in fines and fees.



Only 12 of the 65 total cases involving ethnic intimidation in Pennsylvania in 2016 resulted in a conviction, according to The Appeal’s analysis.



Three cases were still awaiting disposition at the time of publication.

(08-04-2021, 07:34 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: I'm really just going to focus on the first story. The others are just ridiculous, but the bill in the first link is something that I am actually not completely against. We have to decide where the line is between protecting people and 1A freedoms. If a LEO is engaged with someone, whether it be a traffic stop, an arrest, or even just a service call, when these jackasses get up close to them with a camera is impedes their ability to do their job safely and effectively. I am 100% in favor of people holding police accountable for their actions, but when a LEO is dealing with a traffic stop and they have someone 5 feet away in their periphery or behind them where they cannot be seen, now that officer has to split focus. That person may be a harmless douchecanoe, but the officer doesn't know that for sure. Uncertainties in these situations cause officers to be more on guard and, in all seriousness, could increase the potential of someone being injured because of a situation escalation.

You want to film the cops? Fine. Do it from a distance that is not interfering with their jobs. Stay out of it. Cops are on alert during even the most mundane situations because they can turn deadly in an instant. It doesn't happen all the time, or even most of the time, but those anecdotes are everywhere. Adding the element of being close to an officer and trying to film them at close range just makes the situation worse and has a negative effect on public safety.

(08-04-2021, 09:19 AM)GMDino Wrote: Okay, but what distance?  30 feet?  200 feet?

We can pretty well guess this is less about people interfering in police work and more about the police being filmed and held accountable.

Before we were married my wife got pulled over for "swerving" in a little town between where I lived and she did.  I knew the cop.  He was pretty well know for making up stuff and being a dick.

I was following her so I stopped a good way back to make sure he didn't try anything, but I also had to respect that if I got too close he might get nervous and be more of an ass than usual to her and me.  He eventually let her go after she explained she wasn't crying but had allergies and my parents had a cat. 

But I had to make a judgment call.  If there was a law saying I had to stop 30 feet away and I was 28...would I get a ticket and a fine?  Arrested for "interfering"?  I don't want crowds surrounding the police but I also don't like hard fast rules that will make it harder to watch them.

(08-04-2021, 09:19 AM)GMDino Wrote: Okay, but what distance?  30 feet?  200 feet?

We can pretty well guess this is less about people interfering in police work and more about the police being filmed and held accountable.

Before we were married my wife got pulled over for "swerving" in a little town between where I lived and she did.  I knew the cop.  He was pretty well know for making up stuff and being a dick.

I was following her so I stopped a good way back to make sure he didn't try anything, but I also had to respect that if I got too close he might get nervous and be more of an ass than usual to her and me.  He eventually let her go after she explained she wasn't crying but had allergies and my parents had a cat. 

But I had to make a judgment call.  If there was a law saying I had to stop 30 feet away and I was 28...would I get a ticket and a fine?  Arrested for "interfering"?  I don't want crowds surrounding the police but I also don't like hard fast rules that will make it harder to watch them.

(08-04-2021, 07:34 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: I'm really just going to focus on the first story. The others are just ridiculous, but the bill in the first link is something that I am actually not completely against. We have to decide where the line is between protecting people and 1A freedoms. If a LEO is engaged with someone, whether it be a traffic stop, an arrest, or even just a service call, when these jackasses get up close to them with a camera is impedes their ability to do their job safely and effectively. I am 100% in favor of people holding police accountable for their actions, but when a LEO is dealing with a traffic stop and they have someone 5 feet away in their periphery or behind them where they cannot be seen, now that officer has to split focus. That person may be a harmless douchecanoe, but the officer doesn't know that for sure. Uncertainties in these situations cause officers to be more on guard and, in all seriousness, could increase the potential of someone being injured because of a situation escalation.

You want to film the cops? Fine. Do it from a distance that is not interfering with their jobs. Stay out of it. Cops are on alert during even the most mundane situations because they can turn deadly in an instant. It doesn't happen all the time, or even most of the time, but those anecdotes are everywhere. Adding the element of being close to an officer and trying to film them at close range just makes the situation worse and has a negative effect on public safety.

(08-04-2021, 09:47 AM)CarolinaBengalFanGuy Wrote: Well I'm not reading all of that shit, but I thought cops were supposed to all film themselves through their body cams these days? Perhaps a better idea if they are concerned about the media and public outcry from a potential piss poor angle (it has happened before) perhaps they should just focus on severe punishment and investigations for leaks of videos or something to try to keep them private until the matter is dealt with by the law?

(08-04-2021, 01:10 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: It's a major problem.  You literally cannot arrest someone in many neighborhoods without being swamped by people trying to film it.  As for how far away you have to be, the answer is simple, exactly as far as the LEO tells you to be.  



Some departments still lack the funds for body cams for all officers.  But that's really not the point.  The problem is law enforcement being swamped by people trying to film them which creates an extremely unsafe situation.  LEO's being human, don't have 360' vision, so having people close behind you is dangerous.  You want to film, fine, if you're in a public space you certainly have that right, just do it at the distance law enforcement instructs you to be, otherwise you're obstructing and creating the aforementioned dangerous situation.

(08-04-2021, 01:23 PM)CarolinaBengalFanGuy Wrote: I would just say if a cop tells you to do something just go ahead and do it.

(08-04-2021, 01:10 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Some departments still lack the funds for body cams for all officers.  But that's really not the point.  The problem is law enforcement being swamped by people trying to film them which creates an extremely unsafe situation.  LEO's being human, don't have 360' vision, so having people close behind you is dangerous.  You want to film, fine, if you're in a public space you certainly have that right, just do it at the distance law enforcement instructs you to be, otherwise you're obstructing and creating the aforementioned dangerous situation.

(08-03-2021, 09:49 PM)GMDino Wrote: https://theappeal.org/a-black-man-called-the-cops-nazis-and-was-charged-with-a-hate-crime/

It all began that late September day when the police responded to a CVS Pharmacy for a possible active burglary, according to the police affidavit.
A passing motorist called police to say that she saw an older black man pulling on the rear doors of the store.
Police then spoke with a CVS employee who identified Sanderson as the man pulling on the store’s doors; the employee told the police that the man was at the cashier station.
The police approached Sanderson by the cash registers, detained him, and searched his backpack, according to the affidavit. Inside the backpack, police allegedly found a little more than $100 worth of stolen merchandise, including beef jerky and Dr. Scholl’s shoe inserts.
After Sanderson called the police derogatory names, the affidavit states, he also told them “that’s why motherfuckers are killing y’all out here” and “all you cops just shoot people for no reason.”
And police said that Sanderson told one officer, Brian Tully, that he was going to find his wife and have sex with her.
Tully then charged Sanderson with summary retail theft for allegedly stealing the items from the CVS, as well as misdemeanor terroristic threats, institutional vandalism and resisting arrest for incidents that occurred during the arrest, according to court records.
Sanderson was also charged with “felony ethnic intimidation”—Pennsylvania’s hate crime statute—for making angry comments to the police.

(08-04-2021, 01:30 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: And even with body cameras on every officer, we will still see some of these jackasses doing their thing because they don't trust the system to provide the video. They are concerned about transparency, and there are valid concerns with that. But that doesn't excuse putting people at risk. Some people do these things with good intentions, but they don't think through all of the angles. Some people are just jackasses, though.

(08-04-2021, 01:30 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: And even with body cameras on every officer, we will still see some of these jackasses doing their thing because they don't trust the system to provide the video. They are concerned about transparency, and there are valid concerns with that. But that doesn't excuse putting people at risk. Some people do these things with good intentions, but they don't think through all of the angles. Some people are just jackasses, though.

(08-04-2021, 01:23 PM)CarolinaBengalFanGuy Wrote: I would just say if a cop tells you to do something just go ahead and do it.

(08-04-2021, 01:37 PM)Dill Wrote: What do you make of the George Floyd filming. 

Seems like people were pretty close there.

Chauvin seems to have ignored the girl filming him, though.