This story had 3 points after 2 hours and no comments, which I didn't expect to change. I wanted to leave more than an upvote for the submitter, but didn't have anything worthwhile to say, not being an American and knowing little about the related laws. I know that's not a substantive comment, or too meta and too rash, but still, "heh".
> Akins also alleged that the defendants violated his rights by removing videos he had posted on the CPD Facebook page, by ordering him to stop filming the filing of a citizen complaint in the CPD lobby, and by posting in the police department a flyer with information about him.
While I support the right to film public officials in public (which Akins did sometimes), it seems he takes his actions too far, to the annoyance of officers.
Perhaps the judge focused on these specific instances behavior, rather than a typical event of filming an arrest?
It is not about Matthew Akins, but about the ruling of the court and the argumentation it used to arrive at that ruling. US law is based on precedents, so in future similar cases, the court must take into account the argumentation used and apply it to them. Therefore each verdict could potentially mean that new law is created.
In this case, that could mean that a new law has been created that prevents citizens from filming the police. Unless the case reaches the Supreme Court and they make a contradictory ruling that is. But IANAL and I'm happy to be corrected.
> Therefore each verdict could potentially mean that new law is created.
Not potentially - each new verdict is law. All lower courts are bound by law to follow the precedent established by higher courts; in other words, this now applies to all public-camera-bla-bla-bla cases in the 8th circuit.
There is clear and established precedent for how courts can issue rulings that affect only a single case. Evidently that's not the case here.
Interesting. That appears to be a difference between common law and civil law. For example, here there is a legal uncertainty what the law says regarding snow-covered speed signs. Some people have been ticketed for not following speed limits they reasonably could not have seen without stopping the car and wiping the speed sign clean. Others have been acquitted in almost identical situations. Each court makes a new and independent reading of the law and isn't as affected by what other courts have found. The upside is that new laws aren't created by courts, the downside that legal uncertainties can remain forever.
this thought process is why our freedoms are being eroded. if you have a freedom that can be exercised only to the point of government convenience, then it's not a freedom.
> Judge Nanette Laughrey ruled that [..] any citizen or the press, has no right to record the activities of public officials on public property
Weird how governments do watch their citizens in public all the time, waving any privacy concerns with arguments of "public safety" or "national security". While at the same time they prosecute whoever is filming them at work.
The common good is a better prime directive IMO, and this is not a slippery slope to some fascist totalitarian dystopia. A simple example are traffic regulations. Speed limits are a restriction on individual liberty, but necessary for the common good.
I believe that is his point. It does no common good, but on a pure "individual rights" basis you could argue it infringes on the rights of the officers.
At the same time, though, I believe that any adjudication based on individual rights would need to consider the totality. E.g. police officers from the outset are given substantial rights that infringe on our personal liberty ostensibly out of the belief that doing so will protect us against grater infringements of our personal liberty.
Being allowed to film them, then, while it may on a low level infringe on an officers individual rights, can also be seen as protecting the individual rights of others by providing oversight on the special rights police has been granted.
The officers have an easy out: They can surrender their special rights to infringe on others liberty, and we'll surrender any special rights to infringe on theirs.
For my part I think that whether you look at this from a common good or individual rights perspective, as long as you look at the totality, you can arrive at pretty much the same outcome.
Where you get a different outcome is in how you weight different rights up against each other, and how you determine the totality of infringement caused by different actions.
E.g. you could (and to be clear, I strongly disagree with what I'm about to describe) argue that the officers have a right to privacy or to avoid harassment or similar that outweigh the public concern over monitoring their use of their expanded powers if you see their potential to infringe on others rights as leading to less infringements on liberty than the infringements of officers rights by allowing them to be filmed.
"you could argue it infringes on the rights of the officers"
Libertarians typically refer to the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), where your right to swing your fist stops at my face.
It would be hard to argue that filming the officer violates the NAP, particularly since the officer is allowed to film another individual citizen, creating a parity of individual rights.
I see what you're trying to say about coming at the problem from different perspectives, but the individual liberty arguments are almost always going to be the simpler ones to reason about when starting from first principles. The common good arguments become subjective and ambiguous very quickly. Worse, the people making the collective arguments are almost always the ones with the power. Guess which arguments will win out most of the time.
What you say would apply largely to certain parts of right-libertarianism.
As a left-libertarian, the NAP is the kind of sophistry that makes me not consider right libertarian truly libertarian, as taken to the extreme it can be used to actively deprive others of even the right to life, reducing liberty more than it increases it. (Most commonly is it used to protect property rights)
E.g. if I monopolise all sources of food, strict adherence to the NAP prevents you from using violence to prevent everyone else from starving to death.
The left-libertarian view would be that the right of life is far more essential to liberty than property rights - if you are dead there is no way you can be free -, and so if many are at the threat of starvation over your property rights, liberty is maximised by taking your property from you, even at the cost of your life if necessary, as your act of monopolising an essential resources is morally equivalent to violence against everyone deprived.
This is a common good argument and individual liberty argument at the same time.
Maximisation of individual liberty can be similar to taking account of the common good.
This is a traditional left libertarian vs. right libertarian conflict:
The left libertarian view tends to be more favourable to assigning relative weight to rights and favour restrictions on one right to safeguard another.
To take your example, speed limits are small, relatively inconsequential restrictions on the individual liberty of many in favour of reducing a number of infringements of rights on wider society, the most important of which is safeguarding wider society's right to life.
That, to me, makes judicious evidence based use of speed limits a justified restriction on individual liberty.
I think that is key, though: However you word it - be it "common good" or "individual liberty" - what makes the bigger difference is that there are clear criteria (e.g. a hierarchy of importance of liberties) and an expectation of evidence based policy.
Getting politicians to accept evidence-based policy-making seems to be the biggest hurdle at present, as evidence-based policies would overturn a whole lot of legal restrictions that they believe wholly in the importance of no matter what the evidence says.
Yes, but speed regulations are derived from reasonable about sources.
Physic of a car braking.
Neurons and speed of percention, and reaction.
Age of the driving person.
Safety under weather conditions.
That is why, now that automatic driving cars are in the making, suddenly this law can be discussed again.
There is something very diffrent between laws whos source can be discussed by the public and (indirectly) voted upon and laws whos source of origin boils down to (because authority).
There is simply no strong reason given to protect police during there work from filming.
There's no slippery slope? ... and yet here we are discussing how the government creates rules for itself that are different than the rules for citizens. And I'm sure they would use the excuse that it's for the "common good".
I wonder, would an official interacting with a privately owned vehicle on public rodes be considered on private property for the purpose of this ruling?
To piggyback off the quote you pulled, can anyone explain how she came to that legal ruling? It seems incredibly out of sync with the popular perception of American rights and freedoms. Is there something I'm missing?
nothing about the ruling says that. the ruling itself just says they affirm a lower court ruling being appealed so it is not clear exactly what they are ruling on.
It's probably going to depend on the Supreme Court now, since other circuit courts have issued opposing decisions. Here's one from the last time I remember it being discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13672482
IANAL, but one interesting consequence of this ruling might be that it will embolden police since they can point to it as evidence that the right to film police is not clearly established and, even if the Supreme Court rules it's unconstitutional for police to prevent filming, the officers are still deserving of qualified immunity when preventing that constitutional right.
These states are also among the most conservative when it comes to gun rights in defense of freedom against a tyrannical government. Upside-down world we live in.
District and Circuit Court judges are very often local people and historically the appointments are strongly influenced by the Senators in the area served (particularly, but not exclusively, when they share a party with the President.)
These states have always actively tried to impede the advancement of American society so it doesn't surprise me to see them taking such a backwards stance
Reading this gives me chills. Just one more step of many towards living in a police state. I feel like the particular sort of freedom I was raised to enjoy in the 80s and 90s is slipping away.
And as a black person, it really feels like the obvious abuses of police power continue unabated. There's finally a parade of evidence showing just how egregiously the cops treat us, and that door is at risk of closing, if the SCOTUS affirms this over the other circuit's opinion.
Where did the race baiting comment go? I wanted to respond by asking why we always think it's the race that is driving these statistics. Where's any consideration of an alternative hypothesis, such as poverty and inequality? I don't actually know if we have this data, to be honest. Maybe someone can look at records and see what bail was set to for each arrest?
And to you as well, I pose another question: if cops treat black people unfairly, is it because they assume any black person is just going to commit a crime? Or is it more unconscious, in that the income inequality in the black population makes police officers more likely to associate black people with low income? For the record, I think that regardless police response is racially motivated and that we can all work together to change that.
Historically getting groups to identify with their race / national origin has been an effective way to control them politically. If they instead realized that they all had the common political interest of being poor / working class they would be a dominate political force.
After reading this ruling and the original district court ruling [1], this article seems to be sensationalized clickbait.
The Eighth Circuit didn't offer any opinion on the Constitutional questions (citing Rule 47B, affirmation without opinion), probably because they were irrelevant to the case. Akins wasn't arrested for filming police, in fact, according to the district court ruling, the police affirmed his right to film more than once.
Akins complained about several incidents of alleged police harassment and the district court ruled that the police acted reasonably. According to the District Court, his complaints and the court's ruling thereon included:
he was arrested for marijuana possession at a DUI checkpoint ("Akins admitted in deposition that the material may have been his marijuana."). During the arrest, a concealed, loaded gun was found in a holster under his shirt ("Akins said he did not [have a concealed carry permit] and that his attorney told him he did not need one to carry a gun in the car.");
he was handcuffed on the side of the road while an officer searched his car without permission, after he admitted he had a rifle in the back, while a weapons charge was pending against him;
he was pulled over by police and asked for ID ("The interaction
lasted less than two minutes.")
he was arrested for driving without a license or proof of insurance, and for carrying a butterfly knife (which are apparently illegal in Missouri).
Here in Germany it's legal to film police officers but they sometimes arrest you, beat you, damage or search your phone for it. (Source: witnessed all four kinds of events at demonstrations)
Courts in Germany do not generally agree that you can record somebody and use that that recording in court, because of "Recht am eigenen Bild".
Even if a burglar enters your house, you may photograph him, but you cannot use that photo in court. You need to have a sign at the entry telling that you are doing video recordings on your property. Source: police information event.
Still, if you question authority, you need to be prepared. In this case I would recommend immediate upload of the material, so taking or damaging the phone wouldn't help them.
I can see how it has a point for public places (e.g. bars).
But this makes negative sense for your house. What's "at the entry" in case of burglar anyway? Door? Now they just have to claim they entered via window and did not see the sign. How is that any good?
Any restrictions on how citizens protect their property in court should be gravely discouraged. This is just plain taking rights from citizens to award them to feudals (of which police is a member)
According to police, all normal entries would need that warning. A windows is not a normal entry point. It is even enough to have a barricade tape around your land. What is important is that there is a visible border that indicates that crossing is not wanted.
Land is one thing and home is another thing. It's obvious that you should have some kind of fence before ever accusing anybody of trespassing. But burglary inside an apartment is another thing entirely isn't it?
Sure, I wasn't talking about the legality of burglary, but the legality of video record others on your ground, or house for that matter.
If your house has a door, unallowed entry is automatically "Hausfriedensberuch" unless under some limited circumstances. Still, you need a sign beside the door if you want to video record burglars and use that recording in court.
I think it's stupid, but that's the way it is, apparently.
I'm wondering if this is more like "citizens do not have this right" rather than like "citizens do not, and should not, have this right".
There is obviously nothing in the Constitution about recording public officials, and I assume there isn't a statute against it, so that means it's relying entirely on case precedent, right? Which I understand is still law, so I'm as baffled by the ruling as anybody, but I also feel that if I were taking this case on for the first time, I would find myself ruling that citizens don't have this right -- even though I would desperately hope and agree they very much should. Does anyone feel that if there was no case precedent, they would still believe they had this right due to freedom of "speech" (or something else)? What would be your legal justification?
This seems to be mostly concerned with the rules for when someone should be recused? There seems to be no discussion of the right to record anyone anywhere, presumably that was covered in the previous, appealed/upheld judgement? Do you have a link to that?
the judgement is actually pretty useless here since it just says they affirm the lower court ruling which was being appealed and doesn't include any reasoning on why.
I wonder why you would need a right to do a certain thing. In a non-opressive country everything is allowed, unless forbidden. So one doesn't need a right, it just doesn't need to be forbidden. This little change in perspective means a lot.
> In a free speech ruling that contradicts six other federal circuit courts, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a district court ruling that says Americans do not have a first amendment right to videotape the police, or any public official, in public.
Worth noting that this circuit is the outlier, if the assertion is indeed accurate.
But where is the "district court ruling that says Americans do not have a first amendment right to videotape the police, or any public official, in public"?
I scanned over the 8th Circuit's opinion, which mostly talks about why the recusal denial was okay in their opinion:
That's Rice v. Kempker. Part that the Akins ruling quotes:
> Because we hold that neither the public nor the media has a First Amendment right to videotape, photograph, or make audio recordings of government proceedings that are by law open to the public...
So, I'm not a lawyer or a judge, but it seems like the specific claim that the lede latched onto is much more narrow in scope. If a proceeding is public, it doesn't guarantee that anyone is allowed to come in and videotape it. I can't go to the Supreme Court and argue that I have a First Amendment right to take video in there.
Am I missing something? If I'm interpreting this correctly, this news article is outrageously inaccurate.
Here's another take on the story: much more nuanced and in line with what I've been reading in the dockets.
This headline is literally a lie. No such statement was made by the court.
How does this sort of thing happen? It's insanely dangerous when media channels just fabricate news that did not happen. You can see the effects here – the number of comments that are along the lines of "isn't the fascist police-state USA awful" is surprising. The statement in the headline is not even supported by the content of the article, let alone the judgement itself.
Yes, after reading the article I immediately searched the 8th circuits opinions, and the only case regarding Akins is on if the district judge should have recused themselves (which they said no). And the reason I immediately searched was the 8th district is very conservative and much more likely to agree with what is obviously Constitutional and in line with over 100 years of commonly understood law, than to cowboy up and say public photography is illegal.
This is often the case, especially with a hot-button topic. I suspect this might be the case here as well -- I have not read the judgement yet. However, to have an informative discussion, can you provide a TL; DR summary.
The main question I personally have is if can I still film anything and everyone on public property or has this been curtailed in some way shape or form.
I scanned through the dockets a bit; scroll down to see my post.
As far as I see it, the author of the article leads you to believe that 'public' means 'any public space' when in fact the court was ruling about filming in 'public proceedings', which is completely different.
But again, that literally has nothing to do with filming in court and only whether or not the judge should've recused themself...
Where in "Akins also argues that the district court erred by granting the motions todismiss and for summary judgment filed by the defendants and by denying his ownmotion for partial summary judgment" is there anything about filming anyone?
IANAL, so if someone decides to hold public proceedings in a public place, can I still film this (because it is a public place) or not (because terrorism/policy/precedent/whatever)?
Page 14, sections 4, 5, 6, and 7 are the incidents relevant to filming.
With respect to section 5, Akins filmed in the lobby, was asked to stop, and the person who asked him to stop was told that he was in the wrong for saying so. Section 6, he wasn't allowed into a media event because there wasn't a ton of space and he didn't have credentials. Section 7, he was posting video to the PD's and the city's Facebook pages and they removed the videos.
These are discussed on page 34, last paragraph. Seems like Akins is more interested in retaliation charges, and that's what the court is addressing here. The "he has no constitutional right to videotape any public proceedings he wishes to" seems a bit out of place as I re-read it, but I guess it's just establishing a baseline? I'm not sure what specifically the statement is meant to respond to.
The only thing that seems like public proceeding is the media event, and so in that context the judge is saying that I can't just bust in with a smartphone and say I have a constitutional right to record the event.
It's literally linked in the article in full. It's only like 5 pages long. Very clear and obvious that this case had nothing to do with whether you could or couldn't film a public official in public...
Yeah, the ruling wasn't at all about his filming of police officers, it was about whether or not the judge should have recused themself..(?) I'm very confused as to how you could say "Eighth Circuit: Citizens do not have a right to film public officials in public" after the only sentence having to do with filming public officials in public was "Akins also alleged that the defendants violated his rights by removing videos he had posted on the CPD Facebook page, by ordering him to stop filming the filing of acitizen complaint in the CPD lobby, and by posting in the police department a flyer with information about him"
But again, the judgement wasn't at all about him filming public officials, only about whether or not the judge should've presided over the case.
For better or worse, when I notice an HN item that looks interesting, I find myself reading the HN comments first, and skipping the article half the time because of exactly this kind of thing.
Isn't that the whole point of the game? Making everyone believe times are terrible enough already so they would start killing each other and bring war over the lands and death to innocent children?
How can you not want the glorious Mad Maxian apocalypse that country's inbred retards dream of? Are you part of the problem? Some kind of culturally inclusive transliberal? HOW DARE YOU! I HAVEN'T MARRIED MY SISTER FOR THIS!
The 8th Circuit ruled on the case but not on the right to record police in public. On 8/2/16 the lower federal court only found that the plaintiff "has no constitutional right to videotape any public proceedings he wishes to." She also cited a 2004 8th Circuit case holding that “Neither the public nor the media has a First Amendment right to videotape, photograph, or make audio recordings of government proceedings that are by law open to the public." This is far different from the right to record outside in a traditionally public forum (street or park) and only applies to the jurisdiction of the federal trial court not the full 8th Circuit. Akins is now seeking an en banc review or motion for rehearing of the 7/25/27 8th Circuit ruling which basically dealt with affirming the lower court's decision to grant summary judgment to the defendants and also affirming the denial by the trial court judge of the motion for her to recuse herself from the case. The First, Third, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth and Eleventh Circuits have all ruled that the right to record police officers performing their official duties in a public palace is clearly established which will negate a claim of qualified immunity by police.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadWhile I support the right to film public officials in public (which Akins did sometimes), it seems he takes his actions too far, to the annoyance of officers.
Perhaps the judge focused on these specific instances behavior, rather than a typical event of filming an arrest?
In this case, that could mean that a new law has been created that prevents citizens from filming the police. Unless the case reaches the Supreme Court and they make a contradictory ruling that is. But IANAL and I'm happy to be corrected.
Not potentially - each new verdict is law. All lower courts are bound by law to follow the precedent established by higher courts; in other words, this now applies to all public-camera-bla-bla-bla cases in the 8th circuit.
There is clear and established precedent for how courts can issue rulings that affect only a single case. Evidently that's not the case here.
Disclaimer, IANAL.
Weird how governments do watch their citizens in public all the time, waving any privacy concerns with arguments of "public safety" or "national security". While at the same time they prosecute whoever is filming them at work.
At the same time, though, I believe that any adjudication based on individual rights would need to consider the totality. E.g. police officers from the outset are given substantial rights that infringe on our personal liberty ostensibly out of the belief that doing so will protect us against grater infringements of our personal liberty.
Being allowed to film them, then, while it may on a low level infringe on an officers individual rights, can also be seen as protecting the individual rights of others by providing oversight on the special rights police has been granted.
The officers have an easy out: They can surrender their special rights to infringe on others liberty, and we'll surrender any special rights to infringe on theirs.
For my part I think that whether you look at this from a common good or individual rights perspective, as long as you look at the totality, you can arrive at pretty much the same outcome.
Where you get a different outcome is in how you weight different rights up against each other, and how you determine the totality of infringement caused by different actions.
E.g. you could (and to be clear, I strongly disagree with what I'm about to describe) argue that the officers have a right to privacy or to avoid harassment or similar that outweigh the public concern over monitoring their use of their expanded powers if you see their potential to infringe on others rights as leading to less infringements on liberty than the infringements of officers rights by allowing them to be filmed.
Libertarians typically refer to the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), where your right to swing your fist stops at my face.
It would be hard to argue that filming the officer violates the NAP, particularly since the officer is allowed to film another individual citizen, creating a parity of individual rights.
I see what you're trying to say about coming at the problem from different perspectives, but the individual liberty arguments are almost always going to be the simpler ones to reason about when starting from first principles. The common good arguments become subjective and ambiguous very quickly. Worse, the people making the collective arguments are almost always the ones with the power. Guess which arguments will win out most of the time.
As a left-libertarian, the NAP is the kind of sophistry that makes me not consider right libertarian truly libertarian, as taken to the extreme it can be used to actively deprive others of even the right to life, reducing liberty more than it increases it. (Most commonly is it used to protect property rights)
E.g. if I monopolise all sources of food, strict adherence to the NAP prevents you from using violence to prevent everyone else from starving to death.
The left-libertarian view would be that the right of life is far more essential to liberty than property rights - if you are dead there is no way you can be free -, and so if many are at the threat of starvation over your property rights, liberty is maximised by taking your property from you, even at the cost of your life if necessary, as your act of monopolising an essential resources is morally equivalent to violence against everyone deprived.
This is a common good argument and individual liberty argument at the same time.
This is a traditional left libertarian vs. right libertarian conflict:
The left libertarian view tends to be more favourable to assigning relative weight to rights and favour restrictions on one right to safeguard another.
To take your example, speed limits are small, relatively inconsequential restrictions on the individual liberty of many in favour of reducing a number of infringements of rights on wider society, the most important of which is safeguarding wider society's right to life.
That, to me, makes judicious evidence based use of speed limits a justified restriction on individual liberty.
I think that is key, though: However you word it - be it "common good" or "individual liberty" - what makes the bigger difference is that there are clear criteria (e.g. a hierarchy of importance of liberties) and an expectation of evidence based policy.
Getting politicians to accept evidence-based policy-making seems to be the biggest hurdle at present, as evidence-based policies would overturn a whole lot of legal restrictions that they believe wholly in the importance of no matter what the evidence says.
That is why, now that automatic driving cars are in the making, suddenly this law can be discussed again.
There is something very diffrent between laws whos source can be discussed by the public and (indirectly) voted upon and laws whos source of origin boils down to (because authority).
There is simply no strong reason given to protect police during there work from filming.
Again, I don't see any discussion about right-to-record. It's mostly a long list of why you can't sue prosecutors.
the key thing here is that this was a lawsuit by some guy against the police alleging damages from deprivation of rights (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1983)
that is a very different situation from the police charging him with a crime for making recordings.
basically just more stupid ill-informed sensationalist journalism.
IANAL, but one interesting consequence of this ruling might be that it will embolden police since they can point to it as evidence that the right to film police is not clearly established and, even if the Supreme Court rules it's unconstitutional for police to prevent filming, the officers are still deserving of qualified immunity when preventing that constitutional right.
- Arkansas
- Iowa
- Minnesota
- Missouri
- Nebraska
- North Dakota
- South Dakota
South Dakota legislators recently exercised a State of Emergency to overrule an anti-corruption bill voted in by its constituents: http://www.salon.com/2017/01/25/south-dakota-republicans-sta...
True
> ...and not local people
Generally false.
And as a black person, it really feels like the obvious abuses of police power continue unabated. There's finally a parade of evidence showing just how egregiously the cops treat us, and that door is at risk of closing, if the SCOTUS affirms this over the other circuit's opinion.
And to you as well, I pose another question: if cops treat black people unfairly, is it because they assume any black person is just going to commit a crime? Or is it more unconscious, in that the income inequality in the black population makes police officers more likely to associate black people with low income? For the record, I think that regardless police response is racially motivated and that we can all work together to change that.
At least until we end racism, which should be any day now...
http://media.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/17/07/163555P.pdf
The Eighth Circuit didn't offer any opinion on the Constitutional questions (citing Rule 47B, affirmation without opinion), probably because they were irrelevant to the case. Akins wasn't arrested for filming police, in fact, according to the district court ruling, the police affirmed his right to film more than once.
Akins complained about several incidents of alleged police harassment and the district court ruled that the police acted reasonably. According to the District Court, his complaints and the court's ruling thereon included:
he was arrested for marijuana possession at a DUI checkpoint ("Akins admitted in deposition that the material may have been his marijuana."). During the arrest, a concealed, loaded gun was found in a holster under his shirt ("Akins said he did not [have a concealed carry permit] and that his attorney told him he did not need one to carry a gun in the car.");
he was handcuffed on the side of the road while an officer searched his car without permission, after he admitted he had a rifle in the back, while a weapons charge was pending against him;
he was pulled over by police and asked for ID ("The interaction lasted less than two minutes.")
he was arrested for driving without a license or proof of insurance, and for carrying a butterfly knife (which are apparently illegal in Missouri).
1: http://courtweb.pamd.uscourts.gov/courtwebsearch/mowd/BNJpmR...
Here in Germany it's legal to film police officers but they sometimes arrest you, beat you, damage or search your phone for it. (Source: witnessed all four kinds of events at demonstrations)
Even if a burglar enters your house, you may photograph him, but you cannot use that photo in court. You need to have a sign at the entry telling that you are doing video recordings on your property. Source: police information event.
Still, if you question authority, you need to be prepared. In this case I would recommend immediate upload of the material, so taking or damaging the phone wouldn't help them.
Any restrictions on how citizens protect their property in court should be gravely discouraged. This is just plain taking rights from citizens to award them to feudals (of which police is a member)
If your house has a door, unallowed entry is automatically "Hausfriedensberuch" unless under some limited circumstances. Still, you need a sign beside the door if you want to video record burglars and use that recording in court.
I think it's stupid, but that's the way it is, apparently.
I hope it's not their line when Last Judgement comes.
There is obviously nothing in the Constitution about recording public officials, and I assume there isn't a statute against it, so that means it's relying entirely on case precedent, right? Which I understand is still law, so I'm as baffled by the ruling as anybody, but I also feel that if I were taking this case on for the first time, I would find myself ruling that citizens don't have this right -- even though I would desperately hope and agree they very much should. Does anyone feel that if there was no case precedent, they would still believe they had this right due to freedom of "speech" (or something else)? What would be your legal justification?
http://media.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/17/07/163555P.pdf
If you can find a different case involving Akins on July 25th you are welcome to link to it instead. http://media.ca8.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/opnByMM.pl?theMM=07&th...
http://courtweb.pamd.uscourts.gov/courtwebsearch/mowd/BNJpmR...
Worth noting that this circuit is the outlier, if the assertion is indeed accurate.
But where is the "district court ruling that says Americans do not have a first amendment right to videotape the police, or any public official, in public"?
I scanned over the 8th Circuit's opinion, which mostly talks about why the recusal denial was okay in their opinion:
http://media.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/17/07/163555P.pdf
As well as dockets relevant to the case:
https://dockets.justia.com/docket/missouri/mowdce/2:2015cv04...
But I haven't seen anything relevant to the claim in the lede.
EDIT:
Looks like this has some of the language mentioned, starting on page 32. In particular, the last paragraph of page 34:
https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/missou...
> Further, he has no constitutional right to videotape any public proceedings he wishes to. See Rice v. Kempker...
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-8th-circuit/1380406.html
That's Rice v. Kempker. Part that the Akins ruling quotes:
> Because we hold that neither the public nor the media has a First Amendment right to videotape, photograph, or make audio recordings of government proceedings that are by law open to the public...
So, I'm not a lawyer or a judge, but it seems like the specific claim that the lede latched onto is much more narrow in scope. If a proceeding is public, it doesn't guarantee that anyone is allowed to come in and videotape it. I can't go to the Supreme Court and argue that I have a First Amendment right to take video in there.
Am I missing something? If I'm interpreting this correctly, this news article is outrageously inaccurate.
Here's another take on the story: much more nuanced and in line with what I've been reading in the dockets.
http://www.abc17news.com/news/top-stories/attorney-asks-fede...
How does this sort of thing happen? It's insanely dangerous when media channels just fabricate news that did not happen. You can see the effects here – the number of comments that are along the lines of "isn't the fascist police-state USA awful" is surprising. The statement in the headline is not even supported by the content of the article, let alone the judgement itself.
But fake news sadly FTW.
The main question I personally have is if can I still film anything and everyone on public property or has this been curtailed in some way shape or form.
As far as I see it, the author of the article leads you to believe that 'public' means 'any public space' when in fact the court was ruling about filming in 'public proceedings', which is completely different.
It's very short because the appeals court ruled that the district court was correct "without opinion".
Where in "Akins also argues that the district court erred by granting the motions todismiss and for summary judgment filed by the defendants and by denying his ownmotion for partial summary judgment" is there anything about filming anyone?
https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/missou...
Page 14, sections 4, 5, 6, and 7 are the incidents relevant to filming.
With respect to section 5, Akins filmed in the lobby, was asked to stop, and the person who asked him to stop was told that he was in the wrong for saying so. Section 6, he wasn't allowed into a media event because there wasn't a ton of space and he didn't have credentials. Section 7, he was posting video to the PD's and the city's Facebook pages and they removed the videos.
These are discussed on page 34, last paragraph. Seems like Akins is more interested in retaliation charges, and that's what the court is addressing here. The "he has no constitutional right to videotape any public proceedings he wishes to" seems a bit out of place as I re-read it, but I guess it's just establishing a baseline? I'm not sure what specifically the statement is meant to respond to.
The only thing that seems like public proceeding is the media event, and so in that context the judge is saying that I can't just bust in with a smartphone and say I have a constitutional right to record the event.
But again, the judgement wasn't at all about him filming public officials, only about whether or not the judge should've presided over the case.
How can you not want the glorious Mad Maxian apocalypse that country's inbred retards dream of? Are you part of the problem? Some kind of culturally inclusive transliberal? HOW DARE YOU! I HAVEN'T MARRIED MY SISTER FOR THIS!
They don't link to it in the article. This should be the link, it has a summary of the ruling with it.