Bill Paper
How many people today have witnessed police brutality either in person or on
TV? In a Washington Post article by Kimberley Kindy, she stated “at least 385 people were shot and killed by police nation during the first five months of this year, more that two a day, according to a Washington Post analysis. That is more than twice as much of fatal police shootings tallied by the federal government over the past decade, a count that officials concede is incomplete”. Police brutality in the United States is a huge problem today. Each month you hear about more stories about the police using excessive force on a person. There have been endless cases of innocent, harmless, and unarmed people losing their lives or being assaulted because cops end up using excessive and sometimes deadly force to “protect” themselves from an absent danger.
However the public had to do something about this. In many of these cases of police brutality someone has recorded it. Is recording a police interaction illegal? In an article by Steve Silverman, he states “you can record police interactions in 38 states legally, But in the other 12 states require the consent of all parties for you to record a conversation”. One of those states is the great state of California. Massachusetts and
Illinois are the only two states that are cracking down on video recording. On December
9th, 2014 Illinois made it a felony for its citizens to record the police. Massachusetts didn’t make it a felony to record the police, but it was still illegal. “Illinois being the corrupt and violent police state that it is couldn’t let their police and other government officials be held accountable by its citizens” according to an article by Matt Agorist called “Free Thought Project”.
California wanted to reform their laws on the topic
