Can citizens legally -- and secretly -- record police officers in action?
Technological advances have raised questions concerning the constitutionality of new police methods (for example, attaching a GPS device to a suspect car without the police first obtaining a warrant to do so); there are legal issues on the other side of the equation — that is, whether or not citizens are constitutionally protected when doing video or audio recording of police officers in action
Technological advances have raised questions concerning the constitutionality of new police methods (for example, attaching a GPS device to a suspect car without the police first obtaining a warrant to do so).
The Wall Street Journal notes that the other side of the equation – that is, whether or not citizens are constitutionally protected when doing video or audio recording of police officers in action – also raises constitutional questions.
Last month, the 1st Circuit ruled that the Constitution protects the right of people to videotape officers making an arrest, as we reported here.
Now the 7th Circuit in Chicago is considering a challenge, filed by the ACLU, to the state’s Eavesdropping Act, which bars the secret recording of conversations without the consent of all the parties to the conversation.
The ACLU contends that secretly that recording police officers is important to preventing police misconduct, but a federal trial court last year dismissed the case, and the ACLU appealed to the 7th Circuit.
The Chicago Sun-Times reports that 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner did not seem persuaded by the ACLU’s suit. “If you permit the audio recordings, there’ll be a lot more eavesdropping. … There’s going to be a lot of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers,” Posner said at a hearing in the case. “Yes, it’s a bad thing. There is such a thing as privacy.”
“The law in Illinois is an aberration,” Harvey Grossman, an attorney with the ACLU of Illinois, argued in court, the Sun-Times reports. “It’s virtually unheard of for law enforcement officers in other states in our country to be able to use eavesdropping laws as a weapon against citizens who seek to do nothing more than record their activities and oral expressions.”
Illinois prosecutor James C. Pullos argued that police officers do have privacy interests while they are trying to conduct investigations, and they should not have to worry that their discussions could possibly be manipulated and broadcast, the Sun-Times reports.
The ACLU offers an overview of the case, and George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley offers a rebuttal of Posner’s comments.
