{"id":1541,"date":"2011-09-06T12:19:54","date_gmt":"2011-09-06T16:19:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/09\/boston-catches-up-with-atlanta-you-can-video-police.html"},"modified":"2011-09-06T12:19:54","modified_gmt":"2011-09-06T16:19:54","slug":"boston-catches-up-with-atlanta-you-can-video-police","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/09\/boston-catches-up-with-atlanta-you-can-video-police.html","title":{"rendered":"Boston catches up with Atlanta: you can video police"},"content":{"rendered":"Poilce are public employees, and the public has a right to video them doing their duty; so says a federal appeals court.\n

\nPace Lattin wrote for Technorati,\n\nFederal Courts Rule it is Not Illegal to Film Police<\/a>\nJohn S. Quarterman \n

\n\n<\/a>\nThe First Court of Appeals has reached a decision that would allow the\ngeneral public to video-tape police officers while they are working. This\ndecision comes right after several well-known public cases have come to\nlight involving citizens being arrested for video-taping police.\n

\nThis specific case in question was Simon Glik vs.The City of Boston\n(and several police officers), in which a teenage Simon Gilk was arrested\nafter videotaping Boston Police abusing a homeless man. While Mr. Gilk was\nnot interfering with the police, he was arrested on wiretapping charges.\n

\nThe ACLU had sued on his behalf, even when the charges were dropped,\nnoting that there was a growing epidemic of citizens in the United States\nbeing arrested by police for videotaping, even when documenting police\nbrutality and abuse.\n

\nThe First Court Agreed with the ACLU that this should be legal, and wrote\nthat: “The filming of government officials engaged in their duties in a\npublic place, including police officers performing their responsibilities,\nfits comfortably within these principles [of protected First Amendment\nactivity].\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<\/a>\nThe Atlanta Police Department already avoided this problem\n\nby settling a previous case and making a policy that citizens can video police.<\/a>\nThis appeals court ruling\nnow says anybody can, nationwide, because of the First Amendment.\n

\nWhy has this become an issue lately?\n\n\n

\nWith the rise of YouTube and other social sharing services, more and more\npolice have been under scrutiny for their public actions and in response\nhave taken to pressing charges against civilians for videotaping them.\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<\/a>\nHm, like\n\nGeorge Rhynes was talking about at last week’s VBOE meeting.<\/a>\nYou know, even if the news media were trying to cover everything,\nthere simply aren’t enough newspapers and TV stations to do so,\nand their formats don’t permit enough time or space to publish it.\nUnless, of course, they take up video cameras and online publishing\nlike LAKE and K.V.C.I. have.\nWe’ve seen some preliminary moves in that direction by some local\ntraditional media; let’s hope they do more of that.\n

\n\n<\/a>\nAnd it would help if\n\nlocal elected and appointed boards would video their own meetings and put them online.<\/a>\n

\nBut with all that we would still need\n\ncommunities watching boards.<\/a>\n\n<\/a>\nAnd police.\n

\nFortunately, the Valdosta Police Department\n\nseems rather media savvy<\/a>\nand the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Department knows the law,\nat least according to informal chats I’ve had with deputies.\n

\nSo there’s no reason to expect any problems with videoing of open meetings\nor of law enforcement around here.\nIs there?\n

\n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Poilce are public employees, and the public has a right to video them doing their duty; so says a federal appeals court. Pace Lattin wrote for Technorati, Federal Courts Rule it is Not Illegal to Film Police John S. Quarterman The First Court of Appeals has reached a decision that would allow the general public […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[176,97,2,732,11,20,733,734,3,133],"tags":[8747,372,1274,1272,1273,8701,8798,8702,8710,1271,7,1270,652,8700,6,234],"class_list":["post-1541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aclu","category-activism","category-government","category-k-v-c-i","category-lake","category-law","category-media","category-television","category-transparency","category-vdt","tag-aclu","tag-atlanta","tag-boston","tag-citizen","tag-first-amendment","tag-georgia","tag-k-v-c-i","tag-lake","tag-law","tag-law-enforcement","tag-lowndes-county","tag-police","tag-sheriff","tag-transparency","tag-valdosta","tag-video"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-oR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}