Courtesy of Mish.
How to Stop Police Abuse
There’s one way and one way only to stop police abuse: Criminally prosecute it, then allow civil penalties.
In a podcast today with Chris Martenson, Chris suggested civil penalties should come straight out of the police retirement fund, not taxpayer pockets.
But as with CIA torture, government does not really want to stop abuse, they want to stop reporting the abuse.
Earlier this year, Illinois passed a law making videotaping of police illegal. However, the Illinois Supreme Curt struck down the law as a violation of free speech.
So what did the Illinois legislature do? They wrote an even worse law.
Illinois Passes Law Making it a Felony to Video Police
Via email from Jacob Huebert, senior attorney at the Liberty Justice Center, the Illinois Policy Institute’s free-market public-interest litigation center.
Earlier this year, the Illinois Supreme Court struck down a state eavesdropping law that made it a crime for citizens to record conversations with police or anyone else without the other person’s permission. The court held that the old law “criminalize[d] a wide range of innocent conduct” and violated free-speech rights. In particular, the court noted the state could not criminalize recording activities where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, including citizens’ “public” encounters with police.
Now the old law is back, with just a few changes, in a new bill sent to the governor’s desk by the Illinois Senate on Dec. 4. The bill not only passed, but did so overwhelmingly with votes of 106-7 in the House on and 46-4-1 in the Senate.
The new version is nearly as bad as the old one.
Under the new bill, a citizen could rarely be sure whether recording any given conversation without permission is legal. The bill would make it a felony to surreptitiously record any “private conversation,” which it defines as any “oral communication between 2 or more persons,” where at least one person involved had a “reasonable expectation” of privacy….
