New laws trying to criminalize filming cops

Filming police performing their duties is a constitutionally protected activity affirmed by many circuit courts and strongly alluded to by the SCOTUS.

>On July 1, an Indiana law went into effect making it a crime to come within 25 feet of an on-duty police officer if ordered to stay back. Legislators in Florida, Louisiana, and New York have produced similar laws.

25 feet isn't very far. In the other states mentioned I believe it's 10 feet, which is reasonable. It's been this way for a long time. Sounds like the articles objective is to peddle anger.

>What stops an officer from walking up to someone filming them and then arresting them for being "too close" since they're now It's the incident, not the officer. I'm sure one will try, but it the charges would hopefully be dropped. The government machine does protect itself though.

>Does the 10 foot rule apply if you are the one being spoken to by the police? E.g. if you are recording a traffic stop.

It would not, but one will probably try to say it does. The law is for people who have nothing directly to do with the stop.

> "Many states have passed hate-speech laws that protect the police from verbal or symbolic abuse, such as stomping on a “Back the Blue” sign while “smirking in an intimidating manner” (the crime for which a woman in Utah was prosecuted)."

Wow... this is just... The police have a monopoly on the legalized use of violence. Police carry at minimum one deadly weapon (a handgun), but usually have multiple so-called less-than-lethal weapons such as tasters and batons. And often more lethal weapons such as a shotgun or assault rifle in their car. But they are so fragile that a smirk can intimidate them?

I'm not sure how someone wearing body armor and carrying multiple weapons that can incapacitate or kill someone can be intimidated by a smile.

Clearly there's some distance where proximity becomes interfering with an arrest. However, I don't see why that should ever change based on if you are holding a camera or not.

I wonder what pre-existing law or case law says about police telling people too back away.

> I'm not sure how someone wearing body armor and carrying multiple weapons that can incapacitate or kill someone can be intimidated by a smile.

They're wannabe military tough-guys with laughably worse training and culture, much of which tells them they should be pee-pants scared all the time (seriously—folks very-successfully sell some wacko training courses to cops; or, just look at the disconnected-from-reality-and-common-sense mythology they've built up, within their ranks, around fentanyl). That's the best-case explanation for that behavior. Sometimes they're literal machismo-fueled gangsters (yes, literally, as in, "involved in organized crime") and will punch down all day long to make sure they're feared.

[EDIT] Actually, school districts suffer from some similar problems, as far as being sold all kinds of ineffective and wrong-headed wacko programs and training, and too-frequently ending up corrupt little petty empires (OMG, the amount of money superintendents siphon off to pals...)—I think in both cases we may have opted for a level of devolution that's tipped at least a bit too far toward local autonomy, and could perhaps benefit from something like a professional management/officer corp that gets re-assigned every few years, like officers in the military, to prevent empire-building and make corruption and deviation into wacko-land much less likely. Though, I think that kind of thing's on exactly nobody's radar, so don't expect it to ever happen.

[EDIT EDIT] I mean obviously the problem's more severe and grave with cops, it just occurred to me that a lot of the problems in both spheres might be for organizationally-similar reasons.

>I don't see why that should ever change based on if you are holding a camera or not.

It should not, but I believe that holding a camera is a strong signal that a person is operating as a journalist. It could be argued that a person watching an incident can easily be operating in the same capacity.

I was wrong, the SCOTUS hasn't directly addressed filming of police, but that seems like it never got a chance to make it there because it's been affirmed in many circuit courts. They have alluded several times on how they feel about filming government officials (strongly support), but no case has directly made it in regards to explicitly filming police.

https://canons.sog.unc.edu/2022/11/responding-to-first-amend...

To date, there is no U.S. Supreme Court case establishing a right to film public officials engaged in carrying out their official duties or a right to film inside of public buildings generally. However, the Supreme Court has recognized a “paramount public interest in a free flow of information to the people concerning public officials.” Moreover, the Supreme Court has acknowledged that “the First Amendment goes beyond protection of the press and self-expression of individuals to prohibit government from limiting the stock of information from which members of the public may draw.” Filming public officials engaged in public duties may fall within this broadly defined “newsgathering” or “information gathering” right that courts have recognized in prior First Amendment cases.

>Except, you know, in the Supreme Court.

Yes, that is a strange exception.