Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/30/louisiana-law-would-make-it-illegal-to-be-closer-than-25ft-to-cops-or-talk-to-them-after-they-tell-you-to-stop.html
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Gonna legally change my name to Fentanyl so these fascist jagoffs have a seizure after asking for my license.
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Fascists and Libertarians have to protect their beloved guard labour, after all…
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How the people making these laws see themselves:
How I see them:
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“At 25 feet, that person can’t spit in my face when I’m making an arrest,” Fontenot said while presenting his bill in a committee earlier this year. “The chances of him hitting me in the back of the head with a beer bottle at 25 feet — it sure is a lot more difficult than if he’s sitting right here.”
Spitting in anyone’s face is criminal assault and civil battery. Hitting anyone in the back of the head with a beer bottle is also assault, and it’s assault with a weapon, a more serious charge. Committing either of these offenses against a police officer is already a more serious crime than committing either against a civilian. My point being that there are already laws addressing this behavior, if that really was the concern here. Which tells you that it’s not really the concern here.
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I think police officers tend to be jerks on the regular and criminals all too often. That said, if you’ve got people getting close to you while you are making an arrest, you have no idea if those people are filming or are going to jump you. Twenty-five feet isn’t very far for a camera, but is far enough that a police officer has some reaction time if someone comes at them. If it makes a police officer less jumpy and ready to shoot someone I’m all for it.
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Nah. Fuck that. The burden should be on the police to control themselves. There isn’t some epidemic of people jumping police officers while they’re going about their business of writing tickets, arresting people, and investigating crimes. That’s just an excuse. People have the Constitutional right to observe and film the police. Yes, that doesn’t give people the right to interfere and obstruct. Again, however, there are already laws making actual interference and obstruction illegal. We don’t need another law restricting the rights of citizens to make the police feel safer when they aren’t actually in danger, and when that restriction makes it harder to police the police.
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In a courtroom, a lawyer defending a scumbag like Chauvin can make it seem like miles away. Which, as the original article noted, is one of the real motivations behind the law.
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Please tell me you’re joking and not really this clueless. This law is clearly meant to suppress public recording and outcry against police brutality and murder.
Here is your reminder that police are just people doing a job like you and me. They are not enemy combatants or an occupying force. They have to be accountable to us.
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I can see both sides of this. There are professional agitators who call themselves “first amendment auditors”. They film post offices, libraries, government offices and police actions. Their goal is to elicit a reaction from the post office workers, customers, officers, anyone. Anything that creates some drama for the video they will post to youtube.
They inject themselves into the middle of traffic stops, argue with the officer, and prevent them from doing their duties. So I can see some reasonable rules about the ability to harass officers, post office workers, librarians, etc.
Having said that, any officer doing their job in public is absolutely eligible for recording. It’s just that some folks take advantage of that for that sweet, sweet youtube money and harass folks for those clicks and views.
Look up “frauditors” (the term some use to describe those “first amendment auditors”). Nothing they are doing is about activism, they are chasing the almighty dollar. It is these folks who are the reason laws like this are being created.
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False. The reason for this law and ones like it, that have been shot down by courts repeatedly, is to prevent the public from holding police accountable for their actions.
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And when they cross the line (for the third fucking time in this thread now) there are already laws making that conduct illegal. They’re called First Amendment Auditers for a reason. They are exercising their First Amendment rights. Some of them are morons who don’t understand those rights, and they make fools of themselves and get themselves arrested. The others are doing a public service. They are not agitators.
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“First Amendment auditors” can be summed up in this image:
This means that the ones proposing the law are the ones in the wrong here, however bad the auditors are (and especially since the auditors aren’t mentioned by anyone drafting the law or covering it in the press).
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Some auditors are really good. Many aren’t. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of overlap between First Amendment auditors, the Sov Cit movements, MAGA/QAnon, and white supremacists. I do highly recommend the YouTube channel Audit the Audit. That guy isn’t an auditor himself, but he reviews audit videos from auditors, and he analyzes them in detail, including citing statutory and relevant case law from the appropriate jurisdictions. And when an auditor has the law wrong, he calls it out. And when the police are wrong, he calls them out.
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My friend introduced me to them. Most of them are not impressive and enjoy bothering random civilians as much as they enjoy winding up the cops. That said, the ones who go after the Cult of $cientology and their creatures in the Hollywood police precinct are amusing and do good work.
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