Is It Legal to Record the Police?

Saki Knafo and Carly Schwartz write at HuffPo:

In recent years, there have been countless cases of police officers ordering people to turn off their cameras, confiscating phones, and..arresting those who attempt to capture footage of them. Despite a common misconception, it’s actually perfectly legal to film police officers on the job.

“There are First Amendment protections for people photographing and recording in public,” Mickey Osterreicher, an attorney with the National Press Photographers Association, told The Huffington Post. According to Osterreicher, as long as you don’t get in their way, it’s perfectly legal to take photos and videos of police officers everywhere in the United States.

This misconception is pervasive enough that the New York City Police Department circulated a memo last week reminding officers.

“Members of the public are legally allowed to record police interactions,” the memo states, according to the Daily News. “Intentional interference such as blocking or obstructing cameras or ordering the person to cease constitutes censorship and also violates the First Amendment.”

“There’s no law anywhere in the United States that prohibits people from recording the police on the street, in a park, or any other place where the public is generally allowed,” Osterreicher said.

A number of states do bar people from recording private conversations without consent. But as long as the recording is made "openly and not surreptitiously," said Osterreicher, it's fair game. According to Osterreicher, "assuming the position of holding up a camera or phone at arm’s length while looking at the viewing screen should be enough to put someone on notice that they are being photographed or recorded."

Several high profile court cases have taken up the issue, and in each case, the judge has either struck down the law or ruled that the police can't reasonably expect privacy while out in public. In March, for example, the Illinois Supreme Court declared the state's eavesdropping law unconstitutional, saying the law criminalized the recording of conversations that "that cannot be deemed private."