Posted on 08/30/2011 8:44:28 PM PDT by Revel
For those of you not familiar with Simon Glik's case, Glik was arrested on October 1, 2007, after openly using his cell phone to record three police officers arresting a suspect on Boston Common. In return for his efforts to record what he suspected might be police brutality -- in a pattern that is now all too familiar -- Glik was charged with criminal violation of the Massachusetts wiretap act, aiding the escape of a prisoner and disturbing the peace.
As tends to happen in cases like these, the charges didn't hold up, with the Commonwealth dismissing the aiding escape charge and the Boston Municipal Court dismissing the remaining charges. But unlike most arrestees, Glik, with the assistance of the ACLU, fought back against this treatment. He filed an internal affairs complaint with the Boston Police Department, but the BPD neither investigated the complaint nor initiated any disciplinary action.
Undeterred, in February 2010, Glik filed suit in federal court against the officers and the City of Boston under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act. Glik alleged that the police officers violated his First Amendment right to record police activity in public and that the officers violated his Fourth Amendment rights by arresting him without probable cause to believe a crime had occurred.
(Excerpt) Read more at citmedialaw.org ...
my experience and gut feeling is that police aren’t given to taking curtailments to their omnipotence calmly.
s/b “presumed omnipotence”.
Funny how cities have the right to put cameras on street corners but those same cities don’t think citizens have the right to record what their law enforcement personal are doing on taxpayer time on public property or on the citizens own property.
Ping
Thanks for the pings.
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