Controversial encounters between law-enforcement and civilians - the omnibus thread #2

Phoenix, AZ:

I am shocked, SHOCKED to think that anyone would think anything bad about the fine men and women who wear the badge in Phoenix.

They have shot and killed fewer than 700 people this year and a few of them were old homeless white men so you have to agree that they are equal opportunity killers.

Intellectually lazy is another way of saying stupid.

Amber Guyger, the Dallas cop who walked into her black neighbor’s apartment and shot and hilled him, has had her conviction upheld.

Stupid and lazy are not mutually exclusive. They actually often work in couple.

Possibly the stupidest question I’ve ever asked here, but Ima darin’ to ask anyway:
Are there any situations in which a cop is justified in preventing you from filming a situation with your phone, and rightfully come up and just confiscate your phone?

On private property, in occasions where people have an assumed right of privacy, they can certainly enforce the owners permission. In medical emergencies there are some protections against recording by 3rd parties. But those differ by jurisdiction.

Not sure about the confiscation of your phone. I imagine if you were caught on a military base there would be little to prevent the MPs from taking your phone.

Ah, thanks.

Mesa PD is another department that seems to shoot as many (if not more) white people than POC.

No. Hasn’t stopped them from doing it, though.

Understandable-Mesa is 84% White.

They might be successfully able to argue that the privacy of the suspect (who is presumed innocent) must be protected, and if this video were to get widespread attention it might infringe on the suspect’s privacy rights. If they got a toehold with that, they would start using it all the time.

The most likely situation where this could legally occur is if the police believed you had evidence of a crime on your phone, and that the evidence could be destroyed. In that case, an officer likely could confiscate your phone, and if locked, apply for a warrant to have it opened. I have seen plenty of videos where this tactic is taken by the police, and they seem to get away with it.

There generally is no right to privacy in public, even for a suspect. That’s not to say that an officer wouldn’t try to use the excuse, but it would have no legal merit.

LAPD wants the NBA to fine one of its players for things he said (not did, said) during his arrest…while being tased…based on video evidence…that’s not public.

Not a friend of cops, but they want him fined for what he said (N-word), what he did (resisted arrest and injured an officer (have to take with a huge grain of salt, of course)), and why they were there (domestic disturbance/assault)).

TMZ has some video (only showing him wrestling with three officers, so not a lot of context):

So, lots of info needs to come out, but your summation is not particularly fair.

Fair enough; I was foolishly taking a third party characterization as the whole story. I’ll have to read again to confirm or not.

Dear LAPD union,
When you guys start advocating the prosecution and conviction of LAPD police brutality cases … we’ll talk.
The NBA

I have my doubts. It should have no legal merit, but if a skilled legal team pushed hard enough, they could realistically convince this SCotUS to validate the principle. Perhaps they could work backward from the idea that the yellow tape makes a location not-public (restricted access) and extend that to any official police activity.

With few exceptions, appeals Courts have found there is a right to film police. Probably the closest one on point is Glik v. Cunniffe in the 1st Circuit, but there have been quite a few others. In Glik, a bystander stopped to film the police arresting a suspect in a public park. The police arrested him for wire tapping. The Court found that the public has a constitutional right to film the police in their duties. Several additional cases from the 1st Circuit have expanded this. Most circuits have agreed, see Turner v. Driver, Smith v. City of Cummings, etc.

I’m certainly not saying that Courts can’t go the other way, but there isn’t much in the way of evidence to support that it is happening now.