Last month, a Salisbury woman was convicted in district court of resisting, delaying, or obstructing an officer. In a nutshell, the woman was on her front porch, videotaping a vehicle stop on the street, when an officer involved in the stop instructed her to go inside her house, apparently based on concerns about the safety and security of the scene. She refused, and was arrested. A lengthy local story about the case is here, together with an edited version of the video. The defendant has appealed to superior court, and I don't intend to comment on the case itself. Plenty of other folks have done that, including the Salisbury Post and the Washington Examiner, if you're interested. I will say that the issue of citizens' rights to observe and to record the police has been a bit of a hot topic nationally. Gizmodo has this piece on point; Reason magazine summarizes covers the issue here; the widely-read libertarian-leaning blog Instapundit has done a number of pieces on point, including this one; and this article from the Boston Globe discusses the issue in the context of several charges brought in Massachusetts, to cite just a few examples. A few states have specific statutes making it a crime to record police officers who are performing their official duties. More often, people who record the police have been charged under states' illegal surveillance statutes. Such charges may be plausible in states where the law requires the consent of all parties to record a conversation, [...]
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