Via the Chron, Texas Representative Jason Villalba (R-Dallas) has introduced House Bill 2918, which would make it a crime for private citizens to photograph or record police: “within 25 feet of them a class B misdemeanor, and those who are armed would not be able to stand recording within 100 feet of an officer.”

Villalba contends that while citizens have a right to photograph cops, his bill has no constitutional implications as he’s not preventing them from doing do, but just adding some definition to what constitutes interfering with police:

“(My bill) just asks filmers to stand back a little so as to not interfere with law enforcement.”

Meanwhile, Colorado Rep. Joe Salazar, a Democrat from Thornton, has introduced House Bill 15-1290, which:

would impose up to $15,000 in civil penalties if a law enforcement officer seizes or destroys a citizen’s recording or interferes with someone trying to film them.

The Colorado bill addresses police commanding people to stop filming or seizing their cameras or content.

“Primarily, it came up as a result of the number of news reports we’ve been seeing about police officers telling people, ‘Give me your camera,’ or taking the data away, and that is unacceptable conduct.”

The juxtaposition of these bills is, obviously, striking.  The Texas bill reflects the perspective of protecting the interest of the police, as the Colorado bill protects the rights of the citizenry.  Opposite sides of the photography coin.

Much as the First Circuit held in Glik v. Cunniffee that there is a right to photograph police in the performance of their public duties, the war is by no means won.  Legislators will still pursue laws to limit or impair the right to do so, under the guise of protecting cops from interference.  Cops will continue to demand, threaten and interfere with the right to do so, without regard to the fact that there is a constitutional right to do so.

No it’s not a panacea.  No, there are no magic bullets that will “fix” everything.  But recording police is still a critical piece of the puzzle that has changed much, if not everything.  As Conor Friedersdorf explained in The Atlantic when Thai Gurule, a 16-year-old high school student, was saved from conviction by a shaky recording that contradicted police allegations:

But thanks in part to bystanders who captured video of this teen’s encounter with police, Judge Diana Stuart acquitted him last week. After being illegally stopped, her ruling acknowledged, the youth did tense his arms, struggle to stay on his feet, and flail around with his limbs. But he did so to protect himself from “senseless and aggressive” violence that “a reasonable person would have felt was excessive force,” she found, adding that police misrepresented parts of the encounter in their report, which she did not find credible after reviewing the video evidence.

Cases like this are thorny.

Thorny in the sense that it upsets the balance of power upon which we’ve relied for far too long, where the police narrative was untouchable, whether right or wrong, whether mistaken or malevolent.

The judge found that there was reasonable doubt that this teen was resisting arrest. And that’s noteworthy for two reasons:

1) The ubiquity of mobile-phone videos is changing the justice system. In the past, police were almost always thought credible when giving testimony about a struggle. Now, ambiguities and outright falsehoods in their narratives are exposed and judges are reacting by openly impugning the credibility of officers. As the teen’s lawyer put it, “Were it not for the surveillance footage captured by the bank camera and the videos of two bystanders, the truth of what happened to Thai Gurule that September evening might never have been revealed in a courtroom.” It was no longer possible to just accept the version voiced by the authorities.

2) Police unions are hugely threatened by this and their reactions highlight the staggering degrees of deference that they were accustomed to enjoying. For example, consider how Portland police union President Daryl Turner responded to the judge’s ruling.

In his inimitably persuasive way, Ken White noted the police union response to Judge Stuart’s decision:

Something unnatural is happening in Portland, and Police Union President Daryl Turner isn’t going to put up with it. The proper order of things is upended. Black is white and white is black, cats and dogs cohabit. Madness!A judge has disbelieved a cop.

Last week Circuit Judge Diana Stuart acquitted teenager Thai Gurule on juvenile charges of assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest, and attempted assault on a cop. She acquitted him even though the cops said he did it. Is Judge Stuart some sort of pro-criminal agitator? Apparently. In an extensive written order she weighed the testimony of sworn police officers against irrelevant trifles like actual videorecordings of their encounter with Gurule. Even though the cops swore that Gurule threw punches at them, Judge Stuart disbelieved them simply because she could not see any punches on the cell phone videos. Is she some sort of video-fisticuffs expert? Worse than that, she specifically stated that she didn’t find some of their testimony credible.

As if they weren’t cops.

That’s what’s at stake here.  Between the Texas 25-foot law, and the Colorado $15,000 civil penalty for interfering, there are cases, lives, at risk of being buried back under the old ways of the system, where police allegations were unchallengeable, inviolate, for lack of evidence to the contrary.

There will be disappointment along the way, as cops will talk their way out of what otherwise seems plain on video, and experts will explain why you should believe the cops rather than your own lying eyes.  There will be gaps where video is turned off, mysteriously “lost,” when it’s claimed that it won’t support the police version of events.  But there will also be cases where the loss of the video will come back to bite the government in the butt.

In the interim, the battle continues to rage on the streets and in statehouses.  And no one should anticipate law enforcement allowing it to happen without a fight, even though the use of cameras has again proven to benefit everyone.  As if they weren’t cops.