“As a basic principle, we can’t tell you to stop
recording,”
By Michael Krieger: Something I wish I had more time to devote to
is the topic of “know your rights.” Despite the establishment’s
relentless assault on the Bill of Rights, the American citizen still
enjoys more liberties than a large percentage of the world’s population.
Nevertheless, as important as it is to have these rights, it is equally
important to flex them. If we don’t constantly exercise our rights,
they’ll ultimately fall victim to atrophy like a vestigial organ.
While the smartphone has proven an excellent tool for the
surveillance state, its video function has conversely served as a
powerful civil rights tool. So much so that police will often lie to
citizens about their right to film them in public, and one State
Representative from Texas went so far to try to ban the filing of police.Despite all of that, it is completely legal to film police, and people should be doing it more often than they already are. For example, many of the criminal acts cops have been caught in over the past year were only proven without a shadow of a doubt due to citizen video evidence. The best recent example of this came in the case of the South Carolina man, Walter Scott, who was shot eight times in the back and killed as he ran away from a local cop. The officer claimed the man had taken his taser from him, but the video shows the cop planting the taser next to the dead man’s body after the killing. Watch the video here.



