At the Agitator, Radley Balko writes about how Chicago city spokespeople recorded interviews with journalists without their knowledge or consent. While that alone wouldn’t likely cause anyone to lose sleep, the point is that this is a crime under Illinois law for which Chicago police have shown no reluctance to arrest and prosecute people when it comes to recording their antics. When done by government workers, not so much.
If you work for the government and you violate a the law in order to record journalists who cover the government, you get a gentle “reminder.” If you’re someone like Michael Allison, Tiawanda Moore, or Christopher Drew and you violate a bad law in order to expose government abuse, you get arrested, cuffed, jailed, and charged with felonies.
But what’s a double standard among friends, right? In the course of the city’s attempt to rationalize away the “mistake” made by their people, however, this came out:
While City Hall acknowledged the two improper September recordings, it insisted they were mistakes.
“What we have told city employees is that our position is that you follow the law,” City Law Department spokesman Roderick Drew said Friday. “And when this issue was brought to the city’s attention, we reminded employees to continue following the law.”
Follow the law? Continue to follow the law? Rahm Emanuel’s got some ‘splainin’ to do.
In order to “continue” to follow the law, one would have to follow it in the first place. That anyone in government would utter the words that their position is to follow the law raises a shocking question: was this really in doubt?
The issue raised by the need for such an admonition is fundamentally disturbing. What could possibly give rise to a belief by anyone serving in a governmental capacity that they are entitled to ignore the law?
Obviously, police understand as a practical matter that they can largely do as they please, since who will arrest them for blowing through a red light to get to the donut shop? But even the dopiest flatfoot knows he’s not supposed to do it. It’s just a perk of the job, like free coffee and tossing black youths.
But the mayor’s spokesmen are supposed to appreciate that they don’t get to violate the law at will, even if the law is asinine. And yet, a Law Department spokesman had to tell them otherwise?
Radley’s point, that the same conduct that resulted in citizens being arrested, cuffed and prosecuted is trivialized as a mere “mistake” when conducted by people who enjoy a Chicago paycheck, feeds anger and cynicism. And it should. This is what distinguishes public servants from overlords, and a government that openly shrugs off crime by its own people while prosecuting its citizens forfeits its legitimacy.
At the very least, however, the City of Chicago should demonstrate sufficient shame to admit that its people deliberately broke the law rather than merely were confused as to its official policy of whether they had to follow the law at all.
The only thing that would make this worse is acknowledgement by the citizenry of Chicago that they can understand this “mistake,” as if public employees following the law was a toss-up question. It’s not. It never was. It can never be. And yet, it was necessary to make this clear, because city employees maybe thought they didn’t have to follow the law.
If anybody wonders why there are a lot of people who aren’t as trusting of government as the platitudes suggest they should be, this might give them a clue. Or maybe nothing will give them a clue.
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Regarding Illinois law on recordings: Citizen Media Law Project [Ed. Note: link deleted per rules.] has a link to a recent case “AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION OF ILLINOIS, Plaintiff-Appellant,
v.
Anita ALVAREZ, Defendant-Appellee.”
Ms. Alvarez is apparently “the Cook County State’s Attorney”.
“The Illinois eavesdropping statute makes it a felony to audio record “all or any part of any conversation” unless all parties to the conversation give their consent. 720 ILL. COMP. STAT. 5/14-2(a)(1). The statute covers any oral communication regardless of whether the communication was intended to be private. Id. 5/14-1(d). The offense is normally a class 4 felony but is elevated to a class 1 felony—with a possible prison term of four to fifteen years—if one of the recorded individuals is performing duties as a law-enforcement officer. Id. 5/14-4(b). Illinois does not prohibit taking silent video of police officers performing their duties in public; turning on a microphone, however, triggers class 1 felony punishment.”
This is so messed up–recording without getting consent of all parties is a class 4 felony. But recording a police officer in the line of duty is “elevated to a class 1”!? How did that get set down as law!? What possible *public* good could be served by such a law?
Oh, but apparently, the law has a “bug” in it–if there’s no audio, then there’s no felony. Maybe we should have an app for that. Something that goes on your smartphone that starts the camera recording with the mic muted. Most of the most egregious police incidents don’t need audio.
So anyway I’m only skimming here, but it looks like, on appeal, the ACLU was able to get judges POSNER, SYKES, and HAMILTON to see their point that this law kinda obviously goes against free speech. Or as they write in the document “The Eavesdropping Statute Burdens Individual Speech and Press Rights”. Yeah. Agreed. What I would’ve written was: “this law is clearly designed to make it very difficult to expose incidents of police brutality. In effect, it removes the one, last defense the public have to try to keep police from overstepping their already broad range of explicitly granted and traditionally assumed powers. By taking away the public’s ability to capture police misdeeds and hold them up to public scrutiny, this IL law effectively allows police to do whatever they want, whenever they want with virtually no oversight whatsoever. The mere fact that this law even got proposed much less passed is deeply troubling.
Yeah, this is kinda the old news that gives rise to why Chicago’s double standard is a problem per Radley’s post. It’s really not the point of this post.
Sorry about that. I was out of the loop on that. I had heard some vague rumbling a while back, then forgot about it again. I’m not actually a lawyer, just a random person that’s interested in my civil rights. (And trying to become more aware of things like this.)
Thanks for posting my comment even though it was apparently redundant. I’ll probably be redundant on accident again in the future. It’s very hard to avoid. Before posting, I would have to search through every article on your site, and possibly several other blawg or news sites before writing anything. I think I’ll just have to settle for being redundant.
Hey, I don’t fault you or blame you. It’s a good comment otherwise, and one I agree with. Just didn’t want other comments to go down that road. Thanks for being understanding. And it’s not like I don’t get redundant from time to time to time.