Another Settlement Shows Why It’s A Bad Idea For Cops To Harass People Who Film Them
We may not have Supreme Court precedent (yet!), but a number of cases handled by appellate circuits all over the nation have made it resoundingly clear: there’s a First Amendment right to film police officers.
Of course, lawmakers caping for cops have done their best to make this act more difficult. Multiple attempts have been made to create a protective area around cops (the bigger the better!) that would make it more difficult to film police, as well as give cops an excuse to arrest anyone in the area attempting to record them. Most of those efforts have failed, either because they’ve been voted down or they’ve been rejected by courts as unconstitutional.
Cops have also used wiretapping statutes to make bullshit arrests of people who record them. A lot of those efforts have been undone by federal court decisions upholding the right to record officers, even in states where recordings are subject to two-party consent laws.
Meanwhile, down in the Fifth Circuit (where cops are treated better than in other circuits), a settlement has been paid out to the teen who recorded his mother’s arrest by St. Tammany Parish (LA) deputies four years ago.
A teenager who video-recorded his mother’s forceful arrest by Louisiana sheriff’s deputies in 2020 has been awarded $185,000 by a federal jury in a lawsuit filed over one deputy’s attempt to interfere with the recording.
De’Shaun Johnson was 14 when deputies arrived at his family’s home in St. Tammany Parish to question his mother, Teliah Perkins, about allegations she had ridden a motorcycle without a helmet — a charge her attorneys said was baseless and that was never prosecuted.
The confrontation turned physical, and video showed the woman being forced to the ground.
That wasn’t the only confrontation that turned physical. As Johnson attempted to record this arrest occurring in his own home, he was accosted by a deputy far more concerned with the teen’s cell phone than the arrest still underway behind him.
As Mr. Johnson started to record the incident on his phone, Deputy Moring stepped in front of him to prevent him from capturing the incident. Moring shoved Mr. Johnson in the chest and aimed his Taser directly at him. When Mr. Johnson objected, saying, “You can’t Tase a child,” Deputy Moring responded: “Watch me.”
Since the incident, Mr. Johnson was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and received treatment as a result.
Lovely. I guess it was worth it. After all, the parish residents will be paying this bill and Deputy Moring still got to threaten a non-threatening teen with a Taser. It works out for everyone!
The remarkable thing is this settlement still happened despite the Fifth Circuit granting immunity on the excessive force claims brought by the teen’s mother. It did, however, rule that the teen’s claims against Deputy Moring could proceed. The case proceeded to trial and jury decided a rights violation did occur and it was worth slightly under $200,000.
Of course, this being the Fifth Circuit, at least one judge had stupid things to say about civil rights and cops. This time it was Judge James Ho, who has demonstrated multiple times he believes the government should have more rights than the governed.
Ho dissented from the part of the Nov. 30 decision allowing action against Moring to continue over his attempt to stop the filming of the arrest. “The Constitution does not compel police officers to affirmatively help a citizen secure the ideal camera angle while that citizen is actively berating the police just a few feet away from an active physical struggle with another person,” Ho wrote.
Yeah. That’s why the Fifth is the mess it is. Too many judges like Ho, too few like Judge Don Willett. In other words, cops should be able to “affirmatively” threaten someone with a Taser if they don’t stop filming because heavily armed officers with the force of law behind them shouldn’t have to deal with the immense burden of being “actively berated” while performing an arrest.