X-post from General Discussion
Is Chicago really planning on detaining anyone who records arrests at the G-8/NATO summit?
In three months, thousands of reporters from around the globe will descend on Chicago for the G-8 summit. Part of what they will chronicle is the protests and police crackdowns that have made each annual meeting so newsworthy. Sadly for all these reporters, and for all the American journalists with plans to film the protestors and cops, any effort to audiotape police activity on public streets or in parks is a crime in Illinois—a crime punishable by 15 years in prison.
Illinois, like Massachusetts and Oregon, is famous for having one of the most draconian eavesdropping laws in the country. The New York Times recently profiled two Illinois citizens who ran afoul of the law that makes it a Class 1 felony to audio record a law-enforcement officer, state’s attorney, assistant state’s attorney, attorney general, assistant attorney general or judge in the performance of his or her duties. It is a crime to use any device “for the purpose of hearing or recording all or any part of any conversation … unless with the consent of all of the parties to such conversation or electronic communication. …”
A bill now pending in the Illinois General Assembly would amend the state law to preclude criminal prosecution for the “ecording of a peace officer who is performing a public duty in a public place and speaking at a volume audible to the unassisted human ear.” That’s a start. And last August, the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Constitution protects citizens who film police carrying out their duties in public. Last week a civil jury in Eugene, Ore. even found that a police officer violated an environmental activist's Fourth Amendment rights by seizing and searching his video camera without a warrant.
While all this presents an enormous constitutional problem for ordinary citizens, the issue is even more fraught for journalists, who at least implicitly perform a vital newsgathering function under the First Amendment. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (disclosure: I serve on their Steering Committee) has been struggling to keep up with the slew of journalist arrests following various Occupy Wall Street protests. Often, arrests of journalists are used to interrupt the recording, and all charges are dropped once the reporters are transported to police stations. That means the First Amendment isn’t technically violated, but reporters are unable to file their stories and may be held for hours before being released. The fact that cities and police departments virtually never win these suits and may even be on the hook for money damages doesn’t mean that there isn’t a serious problem for journalists. It simply means that, in a pinch, the police have a cumbersome but effective mechanism to shut down contemporaneous recordings of police misconduct as it happens. That’s the part that has to change
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2012/01/recording_police_making_arrests_the_outrageous_illinois_law_that_makes_it_a_felony_.html
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