Radley Balko interviewed three law enforcement officials about why it is ok to charge people for videotaping the police, and the results are pretty horrifying. One prosecutor, who charged someone with 5 felony counts of taping cops that could net the man 75 years in prison basically shrugged his shoulders and said “the law is a bitch,” while another said the following:
But what about cases where video clearly contradicts police reports, such as the McKenna case in College Park?
“You have 960,000 police officers in this country, and millions of contacts between those officers and citizens. I’ll bet you can’t name 10 incidents where a citizen video has shown a police officer to have lied on a police report,” Pasco says. “Letting people record police officers is an extreme and intrusive response to a problem that’s so rare it might as well not exist. It would be like saying we should do away with DNA evidence because there’s a one in a billion chance that it could be wrong. At some point, we have to put some faith and trust in our authority figures.”
Pasco is the head of the Fraternal Order of Police. No wonder you have so many shootings and so many bad cops out there when the fascist mindset comes directly from the top and is passed down the ranks.
The new normal in America is that it is your patriotic duty to film ACORN workers in order to smear them, but out of bounds to film cops breaking the law or abusing their authority.