New Tool for Police, the Video Camera, and New Legal Issues to Go With It

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/12/us/police-using-body-mounted-video-cameras.html?_r=1&hpw

The Oakland Police Department is one of hundreds of law enforcement agencies that are trying out the body-mounted video cameras, using them to document arrests, traffic stops and even more significant encounters, like officer-involved shootings.

In Illinois, Christopher Drew, an artist, used a digital audio recorder to document his arrest for selling art without a permit in 2009 — a friend also videotaped the arrest and uploaded it on YouTube — and was promptly charged under the state’s unusually restrictive eavesdropping law, which makes recording a police officer without consent a class 1 felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison. The case has not yet come to trial.

Professor Wasserman noted that if the police are also videotaping their actions, “to say ‘we can have the cameras and nobody else can’ really becomes problematic.”

He pointed to a sweeping decision issued by a federal appeals court in Massachusetts in August in the case of Simon Glik, a recent law school graduate who was charged under the state’s wiretapping law in 2007 after he used his cellphone to videotape three uniformed police officers he believed were using excessive force. In ruling on a civil rights lawsuit brought by Mr. Glik after the wiretapping charges were dismissed, the appeals court judges said he “was exercising his clearly established First Amendment rights in filming the officers in a public space.”