Are We Becoming a Police State?

I just finished reading a very disturbing article from the Gizmodo website revealing how ordinary citizens are being arrested, jailed, and criminally charged for videotaping their public encounters with on-duty police officers. The rationale for this persecution is a wiretapping law designed to protect people's privacy. How completely upside-down to apply it in this manner, especially when it is often the privacy of the ordinary citizen that is being threatened by the officer!

Video-taping public encounters with the police is the only sure way that a citizen has for protection against harassment or false accusations on the part of our public "protectors". Some of the cases that have occurred are being challenged in court, but the overall effect of prosecuting those who are only trying to protect their own civil rights is to intimidate people in the presence of the police and to aggravate distrust of civil authority. Not a very good way to promote law and order, in my opinion.

After all, police testimony against a defendant is still almost automatically accepted by juries. Unless, of course, the defendant can produce contradictory audio/visual evidence that clearly refutes that testimony. It seems to be a blatant violation of the US Constitution to deprive people of the right to defend themselves in the best way possible. Otherwise, if this prohibition against taping police encounters stands, police can arbitrarily trump up any kind of charge against people that they disapprove of, based on lies about them creating a "public disturbance" or "resisting a police officer".

I hope that we are NOT becoming a police state, but right now the prospects don't look so bright. This is the sort of situation that I would have expected in closed, authoritarian third world countries, not the good ol' freedom-loving, flag-waving USA!