With all of the controversy surrounding police misconduct
and multiple deaths of unarmed citizens, you'd think that politicians would be
trying to find new ways to increase police accountability. On the contrary,
Texas is considering implementing a new law that would make it more difficult
for residents to film the police.
State Representative Jason Villalba introduced House Bill
2918 in a supposed effort to help keep police officers safe. Although it does
not explicitly forbid people from filming the police, it requires them to stand
at least 25 feet away from police activity, thereby making the activity a lot
more difficult. The 25 feet limit would be extended to 100 feet for civilians
who wish to film and are also in possession of a firearm. Reporters for media
outlets with an FCC license (i.e. NOT citizen journalists) would be exempt from
the law.
Just this past week, an officer who killed an unarmed man in
South Carolina claimed self-defense. The cop was likely to walk until video
footage shot by an eyewitness showed a completely different reality, and now he
faces murder charges. In Texas specifically, Hunt County police recently
received criticism when home surveillance footage caught the officers punching
and pinning a nearly nine-month pregnant woman to the ground. Incidents like
these stress why filming the police is so important.
Due to a number of high-profile killings at the hands of
police, several cities around the United States are exploring the option of
uniforming police officers with body cameras to increase accountability. The
law Texas is considering takes an opposite approach by potentially scaring
would-be filmers away with a potential misdemeanor charge.
Rep. Villalba defended his legislation on social media,
explaining, "[it] just asks filmers to stand back a little so as not to
interfere with law enforcement." While in the past that might have seemed
like a reasonable concession, the timing of this bill makes it hard to interpret
it as anything but an additional layer to help cover up gross police
misconduct.
First, if a dangerous situation breaks out, not many amateur
videographers are trying to get all that close to a volatile skirmish anyway,
so it seems silly to assume that they would even want to get so close as to
"interfere." Second, if the individual who filmed Eric Garner's death
were forced to stand farther away, we'd never realize just how egregious this
senseless killing was. Third, the more distance between the person with the
camera and the police, the more ambiguity there is. LAPD has excused a recent
killing by saying that the deceased reached for an officer's weapon. Although
the video of the killing does not exactly corroborate the police's account,
it's not clear enough to say definitively that it did not occur.
The bottom line is that cameras are one of the best tools a
nervous public has to protect against police abuses. Making laws to forbid or
even impede on this right does the people of the United States a disservice,
which is why federal courts have upheld the act as something protected by the
First Amendment. If we live in a world of mass surveillance where the
government tracks our every move, I don't see what's so unfair about turning
around the lens and allowing the people to do some surveillance of their own.
