Police officers lie. Is it all of them or just some of them? Is it a few bad apples, or is the entire orchard rotten?
In Connecticut, cops recorded themselves lying and fabricating charges against a local activist with the man’s own camera. The camera the police illegally confiscated and thought was inoperable. A portion of that recording is below the fold. Michael Picard was alerting his fellow residents that a DUI checkpoint, which he opposes, was being held in an area of West Hartford. Picard was holding a handwritten sign, “cops ahead, remain silent,” as he stood on one of those small medians in the street. According to the ACLU, the state troopers who were working the checkpoint eventually approached Picard, knocking the camera out of his hand. They search Picard and find he is carrying his legal, permitted firearm. One trooper takes his permit and walks away to run a records check. While one trooper does this, Picard picks up his camera to examine it, and that’s when another walks over and takes the camera from him. The trooper takes Picard’s camera over to the squad car where the first officer is checking Picard’s background. That’s when the camera—which hadn’t been damaged—began recording the officer’s plot:
So we get the three troopers at the cruiser talking about what to do. Michael’s permit comes back as valid, they say “oh crap,” and one of the troopers says “we gotta punch a number on this guy,” which means open an investigation in the police database. And he says “we really gotta cover our asses.” And then they have a very long discussion about what to charge Michael with—none of which appear to have any basis in fact. This plays out over eight minutes. They talk about “we could do this, we could do this, we could do this….” In Connecticut, police officers have clear requirements under the law to intervene and stop or prevent constitutional violations when they see them. But at no time did any of the three officers pipe up and say, “why don’t we just give him his camera back and let him go.”
In the end they decide on two criminal infractions: “reckless use of a highway by a pedestrian,” and “creating a public disturbance.” They have a chilling discussion on how to support the public disturbance charge, and the top-level supervisor explains to the other two, “what we say is that multiple motorists stopped to complain about a guy waving a gun around, but none of them wanted to stop and make a statement.” In other words, what sounds like a fairy tale.
The tickets they gave him started a criminal prosecution in the Connecticut superior court. Eventually the state dismissed first one then the other count, though it took a whole year for him to disentangle himself from the criminal justice system.
The ACLU has brought suit against the Connecticut State Troopers on behalf of Picard, based on three claims: violation of Picard’s right to record, the seizure of Michael’s camera without probable cause, and “a First Amendment retaliation claim.” You can look over the ACLU’s complaint here.