Public Defense

?Watch this! Cuff him up?

By Gideon

Well, let’s take this New Haven police officer at his word and “watch this”:

Quinnipiac student arrested after filming another student’s arrest from The Quinnipiac Chronicle on Vimeo.

If only someone had the technical know-how to turn that first 16 seconds into a repeating GIF and set it to music, it’d surely become the latest meme.

But all dancing cop jokes aside, this is yet another example of the burgeoning battle between officers and the public’s right to videotape their interactions with law enforcement. A recent example that I blogged about is now no longer facing criminal charges. In CT, it still is legal to videotape interactions between the police and citizens in public (but still illegal to record conversations between private individuals without consent).

In this case, it seems the videotaping escalated the incident from a ticket to an arrest:

According to multiple witnesses, within minutes of Hartford beginning to film a Quinnipiac student being arrested outside of Toad?s Place in New Haven, an officer tackled and handcuffed him. Hartford was charged with Disorderly Conduct and Interfering with a Police Investigation. He went on to spend the night in jail at 24 Union Avenue.

Was he truly interfering and being a douche, or just an aware citizen trying to catch the ordeal on camera is up to you to decide. What’s clear is that officers were uncomfortable from the get-go with the presence of the camera (look at the officer on the right and how he looks so awkward, just standing there).

?As soon as I took out the camera they were uncomfortable because they knew what they were doing was wrong,? Hartford [the student, not the city] said.

Quinnipiac senior Kevin Hillier saw the whole incident, and thought that the officers? response was unwarranted.

?They claimed [Hartford] taking the video of the arrest was interfering with their interrogation when they arrested him, but the only reason him filming was an issue was because they made a big deal out of it,? Hillier said. ?If the police didn?t start dancing in front of the camera and yelling at him, there would be no interference.?

The video taken by Hartford appears to show that the officers only arrested the original student because Hartford began filming. One officer, who began dancing when the camera was turned on, looked into the camera and said, ?Watch this.? He then asked the student who they were questioning whether he was with Hartford. When the student replied yes, the officer turned to another officer and said, ?Cuff him up.?

Okay, fine, I lied. Someone chop up this clip and send it to ytmnd.com ASAP.

Full post as published by A Public Defender on September 30, 2010 (boomark / email).