After the racial tensions over cops shooting black people became a big story with the Ferguson incidents, Paul Jacob worked on several citizen initiatives to require “body cams” on police officers in cities around the country. Resistance to the practice has come from several quarters, not infrequently the police themselves — despite the “cop cams’” utility being to protect cops as much as anyone.
But the strangest wrinkle to this ongoing story came recently. Consult Jacob Sullum at Reason, whose article “Albuquerque’s Police Chief Says Cops Have a 5th Amendment Right To Leave Their Body Cameras Off” tells the strange behavior of Police Chief Harold Medina, who got in a crash after driving by a homeless encampment on the way to a press conference, with his wife in the department-issued pickup truck. And yes, he pled the Fifth.
“Medina is suggesting that cops have a constitutional right to refrain from recording their interactions with the public whenever that evidence could be used against them,” explains Sullum. “By turning on their cameras in those situations, he argues, police could be incriminating themselves. That is the whole point.”
But read the whole article. It’s quite a story.
1 reply on “Camera Shy”
Plainly, under the Constitution, someone may be employed to do nothing other that record video and audio information. Plainly, under the Constitution, someone may be employed for those purposes and for others as well. Someone who fails to meet such terms of employment should be dismissed.
Even if we somehow grant that a police official had a right to stop recording video and audio if he thought that the recording could serve to incriminate him-or-her, that official would not have a right to continued employment under those circumstances.
But, rather obviously we should not grant that police officials have retained that right. Any and all contracts are exchanges of rights. Those who become police officials exchange the right not to have an operating camera on their persons.
At this stage, the Governor and State Attorney General are obligated to act. But it’s doughnuts-to-dollars that they won’t, and it’s doughnuts-to-dollars that the voters of Albuquerque and of New Mexico will continue enabling these shirkers.