Possible Devils advocate - you can easily gather evidence while not being within 8 feet of an officer. This could be more to do with interfering with police activities than preventing evidence collection. Potentially unconstitutional either way but i imagine there are legit concerns with people/press being that close to officers.
Once the police have the ability to arrest people for videoing them, they will use it whenever they please. Then argue after the arrest whether or not it was '8 feet' or not. The person video-taping still gets put into custody and has to deal with all of the consequences of that, including a not so gentle arrest. Then, best case, if they can prove it was outside 8 feet, they might get the charges dropped, but they won't be able to sue or at least it be very unlikely to succeed. The functional result (if this bill passes the senate) is that the police in arizona can, and will, arrest anybody they want to who video tapes them. Following that will be similar bills in other states.
Being arrested is a big deal and you could be in jail for some time, even if the charges are dropped. Whereas unlawful arrest could result in consequences for officers, this law would give that arrest at least a pretext of being reasonable, all they have to say is they misjudged the distance and then are off the hook - "honest mistake".
> Once the police have the ability to arrest people for videoing them,
they will use it whenever they please.
Maybe not quite. An interesting dilemma arises. If our law abiding,
peace officers arrest someone for filming - then that media becomes
the evidence in an arrest. So they may safely arrest someone so long
as they (the police) are doing nothing wrong while the cameraman is is
"illegally" filming them.
But then why would anyone be filming police who are doing nothing
wrong?
As soon as the police are engaged in acts of violence, and people
start filming them, it would not be in their interests to arrest
anyone, unless they were prepared to follow through, destroy evidence,
intimidate detainees into silence or commit perjury.
So this idea puts the police into an interesting bind, and suggests it
would only have consequences that lead quickly to tyrannical outcomes.
> As soon as the police are engaged in acts of violence, and people start filming them, it would not be in their interests to arrest anyone, unless they were prepared to follow through, destroy evidence, intimidate detainees into silence or commit perjury.
We already see this happening. IIRC Police unions are the only people allowed to review the evidence for the first 24 hours and are free from consequence were it to get "lost".
> As soon as the police are engaged in acts of violence, and people start filming them, it would not be in their interests to arrest anyone, unless they were prepared to follow through, destroy evidence, intimidate detainees into silence or commit perjury.
This is such a naive take from someone who had never had to face police officers blatantly violating your rights and physical well-being.
Yep. They already yell "stop resisting!" at people who are clearly not resisting to prime the memories of witnesses. "You're too close!" fits right into that dynamic.
"you can easily gather evidence while not being within 8 feet"
Only a bystander can. The person who needs it the most, can't.
Meanwhile, the police's own body cam is on while they are within 8 feet of you. Assuming they didn't turn it off, assuming you get access to it later, in a timely manner, unedited...
There is an argument about interference and safety, but no valid argument in the end, since there is no way to allow the limitation without creating a tool for abuse that's worse.
Better to let actual cases of interference be tried as such. Make the officer have to invoke a process after the fact, and have to defend their claim of criminal or endagering interference in court.
In fact, if my impression of the news is correct, police body cams do more to protect the police from unjustified charges of abuse than they do to protect the victims of police abuse.
Perhaps that is an effect of police unions? Perhaps it is simply a good thing and we should have more of them?
People independent of the police filming it seems like a good idea to me. For all concerned.
> In fact, if my impression of the news is correct, police body cams do more to protect the police from unjustified charges of abuse than they do to protect the victims of police abuse.
This is how they're marketed to police departments, not as cameras that keep cops honest, but as cameras that keep the public from lying about police misconduct. It plays into the trope that is popular with law enforcement, that misconduct doesn't exist, it's just the whiny public and their lawyers who are victimizing cops.
That's why the cameras have buttons that allow cops to turn them off, and why they also often have buttons that require the cops to first turn them on themselves before interactions. Some of them even have buttons that, when pushed, turn the camera on for only 30 seconds.
If the cameras were meant to keep cops honest, those features wouldn't exist. Body cameras are not about documenting potential misconduct, they're about documenting evidence that can later be used against the public in court.
If only failing to have the cam present or running were considered a super bad crime instigating a huge investigation with a bias towards guilt and you have to prove innocense.
Instead, at least in some places, cops get away with turning their cams off or otherwise suffering mysterious glitches and data loss.
There used to be standards for certain things where the appearance of imporopriety was bad enough all by itself, exactly because some things can't really be proven, like how you can't prove a negative. That seems to be pretty much gone now. Judges don't recuse themselves from cases where they have a conflict of interest, and the other judges just let them, etc.
So, in the sweet naive child view of the world, a cop merely no being able to produce their body cam footage for some incident, no matter what they say or what the story is should be almost automatic grounds for dismissal of the whole case and maybe the cop too, or at least a huge stink and huge investigation. But I don't think we live in that world we tell gradeschool kids we live in.
With what? That phone that just got knocked to the ground? Or that phone you can't operate while you're handcuffed or busy trying to breath gravel?
You do need the right to film yourself, but there is no valid rationale for limiting it to yourself, making it so that your defense is entirely your responsibility and if you fail to film yourself for any of the imfinite reasons that can happen, you're out of luck.
It just doesn't hold water. All this does is gives cops something they can threaten bystanders with on the spot, which will work on most people most of the time.
When they go home and google about it later and figure out that actually they could have filmed, or it would just be a harmless fine they would have been willing to risk, the damage is already done. You can't go back and collect the evidense after the fact, and most people don't have repeated incidents with police that are bad enough they would even feel a need to film. That one incident was probably all they may ever have, and they didn't film that one.
So the technicalities don't excuse this. Police have a goal that they don't have the right to actually mandate (don't film me while I'm operating on behalf of the state), and this rule doesn't technically mandate it, yet still achieves that goal anyway.
The problem is if your rights are being violated by an officer, that officer is probably within eight feet of you. It's bullshit that you're not permitted to record your rights being violated.
So he walks up to you silently and then arrests you for having recorded him within 8 feet while he had not interacted with you. The cops do not follow the law in good faith ever and this gives them another trivially abused tool, like when they would stop people because they "smelled" pot that never existed
How does this even work? Police officer walks to within 7 feet of you: you’re not allowed to film. They tell you to stop filming and then suddenly you’re allowed to because they’re interacting with you?
They can arrest you for recording at any distance, and then drop the charges later and likely just get away with it. It won’t matter either way because they already achieved their goal: stop you from recording.
Even if you sued successfully for that it wouldn’t matter. Their goal was to stop your recording whatever worse thing they were presumably doing which can never be undone.
If a cop is actively walking towards you, do you have to stop recording once they reach 8 feet? How can you gather evidence if there are a dozen cops surrounding the abuse, with them approaching anyone who is outside 8 feet to force them further and further away?
You know what’s going to happen. The cop sees the person recording and walks towards him asking if they are recording and gets inside 8 ft and arrests them. Easy! Or another cop dashes the person recording just to stop and arrest the recording
