Attorney Adam Cohen, writing in Time, asks "Should Videotaping the Police Really Be a Crime?"
Despite considerable recent use (or, depending on your point of view on the subject, misuse or outright abuse) of wiretap laws to make it so, Cohen argues quite soundly that it is not, and should not be, any crime to videotape police interactions in a public place. (One might argue that one should have even more right to videotape such interactions in a private place, where there are no witnesses and it's your word against theirs. But that's a separate issue.)
Even if these cases do not hold up in court, the police can do a lot of damage just by threatening to arrest and prosecute people. "We see a fair amount of intimidation — police saying, 'You can't do that. It's illegal,'" says Christopher Calabrese, a lawyer with the ACLU's Washington office. It discourages people from filming, he says, even when they have the right to film.
Ford was right to insist on her right to videotape police actions that occur in public, and others should too. If the police are doing their jobs properly, they should have nothing to worry about.
It's been observed elsewhere that police these days routinely record video of what they do on duty and citizens they interact with, although there have been incidents in which by a strange coincidence, the video cameras of every officer on a particular call all mysteriously malfunctioned at the same time. Yet the police, who routinely videotape the public with whom they interact, seek to prevent the public from videotaping them in turn. As has also been observed elsewhere, what's sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander.
Perhaps, to use another instance of sauce for the goose, when police object to being videotaped by those they are interacting with, they should be asked the question they themselves frequently ask when trying to browbeat a citizen into allowing them to conduct a warrantless search without due cause:
"What's the problem? If you have nothing to hide, what are you worried about?"
