First Amendment Lawsuit Results In Louisiana Police Department Training Officers To Respect Citizens With Cameras
from the telling-them-something-they-already-know dept
Another police department has "learned" it has to respect the First Amendment rights of citizens. A settlement obtained by the ACLU as the result of a civil rights lawsuit will result in additional training that surely should be redundant at this point in time.
Training officers on First Amendment rights, including the public's right to photograph officers while performing their public duties, has been implemented at the Lafayette Police Department. The training was included in a settlement announced by the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana today.
The lawsuit [PDF] was brought by Chelline Carter, who had her camera warrantlessly seized and searched by Officer Shannon Brasseaux of the Lafayette PD. Carter had been called to a local drugstore because her son had just been arrested. After helping the officer find her son's ID card, Carter walked over to the vehicle her son had been placed in and took a photo of him.
Officer Brasseaux then took Carter's phone from her, claiming she had broken the law by taking pictures of "evidence" [?]. He then swiped her phone to open it, searched for the photo she had taken of her son, and deleted it.
Despite the officer's claim Carter had broken the law, she was free to go after Brasseaux had deleted the photo. Carter filed a complaint the next day. Multiple violations occurred here, but the settlement apparently contains no further instructions for officers to follow the Supreme Court's Riley decision. The rights violation took place in January 2017, three years after the Supreme Court declared warrants were required for cellphone searches.
Still, it's a good win on the First Amendment side, firmly establishing a right to record police in Louisiana. The settlement also will require the police to pay Carter's $12,000 in legal fees. Citizens of Lafayette should be righteously pissed Officer Shannon Brasseaux has dipped into their pockets to pay for his unwillingness to respect citizens' rights. It was a bullshit move and likely one Brasseaux has gotten away with before. If he hadn't, he probably wouldn't have attempted it during an arrest in which everything else had gone by the book.
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Filed Under: cameras, first amendment, free speech, louisiana, police
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Respect my authoritah!!
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I hope they'll make a hard copy of the roll call.
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Re: I hope they'll make a hard copy of the roll call.
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Sad
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Re: Sad
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claiming she had broken the law by taking pictures of "evidence" [?]. He then swiped her phone to open it, searched for the photo she had taken of her son, and deleted it.
Now that's some real cop thinking going on right there! It's evidence, so I'm gonna go ahead and delete it. Proof positive that there's an IQ cap to become a cop, and it's not far north of retarded.
I think it's time to start purging police departments of the simple minded morons who somehow think that the public will buy such an obvious pile of bullshit. Or at least they should bring in some smarter people to help them come up with a more plausible excuse.
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Not defending them, but the claim wasn't that the picture was evidence, but that it was a picture of evidence.
That the 'evidence' in question was her son sitting in the police car is stupid enough on it's own, as well as the idea that somehow taking a picture of 'evidence' is justification for deleting it, no need to misconstrue it and potentially give someone who might try to defend the action an out(a bad one to be sure, but still) by allowing them to point out that the criticism being made doesn't match what happened.
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claiming she had broken the law by taking pictures of "evidence"
But if taking a picture of evidence is breaking the law, then isn't the photo of evidence now evidence of the crime of photographing evidence?
You know what, never mind. I re-read that sentence 3 times now and my head hurts.
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And then what?
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until
the only training that is needed is a court room where officers are tried for constitutional violations under the color of authority.
But since no one wants to put them in jail, including the citizens... we have a long way to go before people wake up to the tyranny.
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It's not even about citizens with cameras, how about treating EVERYONE with a basic level of respect, regardless of if they are citizens, with or without cameras, suspects or outright fugitives? How hard is it to fuck up such a simple thing as being a human being with an ounce empathy?
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This is more cya for the office chair patrol.
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What surprised me....
If I take a picture on my phone and then turn it off, that photo is saved on the encrypted part of the phone and I have to log in to access it. Not only that, it is also stored in the cloud, so if someone confiscates my phone, I still have the picture.
Sure, having a locked phone is slightly less convenient... but it's also a LOT more secure in the long run.
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Re: What surprised me....
The former is a matter of convenience, and I keep meaning to get around to changing it, but haven't done so yet.
The latter is mainly because I have yet to find a reliable way of backing up the phone and its data (such that I can restore it after a failed upgrade) that I'd expect to work with the encrypted storage.
(I run LineageOS, formerly CyanogenMod, so upgrades and rollbacks and so forth are entirely under my own control.)
The lack of encryption on the phone means that the lack of a passcode is significantly less of a security reduction than would otherwise be the case.
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Re: Re: What surprised me....
I thought that the TWRP recovery had fixed the issue that didn't allow it to access encrypted partitions by now. Have they not? I've been considering rooting my Essential PH-1 after the Oreo update and if I can't perform a full Nandroid backup because of the encryption, that makes it a bit more dangerous to play around with ROM's.
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Re: Re: Re: What surprised me....
I've got a week-and-a-half off work at the end of February, so maybe I'll take the time to make a project out of it all at that point.
If you have any links to any information on the question, I'd be interested.
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