Own the Block

About this Episode

Do you have a right to film the police? Should people film the police? A lot of attention has been given to the use by police officers of body cameras (and dash cameras), but what about citizens’ filming arrests on the street? With Jocelyn Simonson, we explore the ways that the use of cameras both facilitates and is expression.

This show’s links:

• Jocelyn Simonson’s facult profile and writing
• Oral Argument 64: Protect and Serve (guest Seth Stoughton)
• Jocelyn Simonson, Beyond Body Cameras: Defending a Robust Right to Record the Police
• Timothy Williams, James Thomas, Samuel Jacoby, and Damien Cave, Police Body Cameras: What Do You See? (an interactive NY Times feature using videos created by Seth Stoughton); see also Jason Kottke’s link to this piece, which also features links to related ideas in film direction
• The Chicago Police Accountability Task Force (with links to the report); see also Monica Davey and Mitch Smith, Chicago Police Dept. Plagued by Systemic Racism, Task Force Finds
• ACLU of Illinois v. Alvarez (featuring a dissent by Judge Posner)
• Floyd v. City of New York (the stop and frisk case); see also p.597 of the same case for the judge’s quotations of police, some used in Jocelyn’s paper, evincing a “contempt and hostility . . . toward the local population”)
• This American Life 414: The Right to Remain Silent, Act Two (“For 17 months, New York police officer Adrian Schoolcraft recorded himself and his fellow officers on the job, including their supervisors ordering them to do all sorts of things that police aren't supposed to do.”)
• Jocelyn Simonson, Copwatching
• About the panopticon
• Seth Stoughton, Law Enforcement’s ‘Warrior’ Problem (read online here if you don’t want the PDF)
• About Stephen Colbert’s performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner (Here’s the video.)
• City of Houston v. Hill (“Why don’t you pick on somebody your own size?”)
• Fields v. City of Philadelphia (finding no First Amendment right to film police officers)
• Samuel Warren and and Louis Brandeis, The Right to Privacy
• Oral Argument 1: Send Joe to Prison (guest Sonja West)
• Sonja West, First Amendment Neighbors
• Sonja West, The Monster in the Courtroom