What you see above is a mentally ill homeless man being "detained" by a little under a dozen police officers in the Antioch area of California. This all happened a couple of days before Michael Brown was shot dead in broad daylight. What you can't hear, unless you watch the video, is the beating he is taking or the police dog barking, or the sirens … or the taser. Together it makes for a rather harrowing watch.
As photographyisnotacrime.com points out here:
Police in Northern California beat and tased a mentally ill man before siccing a dog on him, then turning on citizens who recorded the incident, confiscating cell phones and in one case, ordering a witness to delete his footage.
But one video survived anyway, slightly longer than two minutes, where a cop from the Antioch Police Department can be heard saying he wants cameras confiscated right before the video stops.
That's against the law.
Even the conservative Supreme Court has ruled that that is against the law.
The Antioch Police Department did release a statement claiming they have the right to seize cameras if they are not handed over voluntarily.
But wait a minute. That can't be right.
The only time police have the right to seize your camera without a warrant is under “exigent circumstances,” a legal term meaning they have a strong belief the witness is going to destroy the video which contains evidence to a crime.
But they told ABC news:
The first witness said, "They didn't take no for an answer apparently because they pulled one lady out of her vehicle to get it, and she wouldn't give it up and they were about to arrest her and finally they let her go because I believe she gave it up."
However, a third witness told ABC7 News he was ordered to erase his video. So he did. He said, "They were being kind of controlling, like demanding, 'erase your phone' and they were trying to take people's phones away."
You lose the right to ask for a citizen's phone the moment you ask/tell them to "erase" its content. That is clearly the opposite of the law.
Here's the Department of Justice's take on it since 2012:
Policies on individuals’ right to record and observe police should provide officers with clear guidance on the limited circumstances under which it may be permissible to seize recordings and recording devices. An officer’s response to an individual’s recording often implicates both the First and Fourth Amendment, so it’s particularly important that a general order is consistent with basic search and seizure principles. A general order should provide officers with guidance on how to lawfully seek an individual’s consent to review photographs or recordings and the types of circumstances that do—and do not—provide exigent circumstances to seize recording devices, the permissible length of such a seizure, and the prohibition against warrantless searches once a device has been seized. Moreover, this guidance must reflect the special protection afforded to First Amendment materials.
Policies should include language to ensure that consent is not coerced, implicitly or explicitly. See Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U.S. 218, 228 (1973) (“[T]he Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments require that a consent not be coerced, by explicit or implicit means, by implied threat or covert force. For, no matter how subtly the coercion was applied, the resulting ‘consent’ would be no more than a pretext for the unjustified police intrusion against which the Fourth Amendment is directed.”).
Watch the video below the fold.