A Victory For The First Amendment. And For Citizen Police Accountability.

This feels good, so good. It seems like I’ve been waiting forever to write about this, and I’ll be honest, I have a lump in my throat as I type this, and it feels just fine.

In the aftermath of the Walter Scott shooting, the Eric Garner killing, the Tamir Rice shooting, the Michael Brown shooting, and the George Floyd killing, the GOP has been berserk. Man, talk about a bird of ruffled plumage.

The reason is simple. Do you notice a common thread in all of those unforced police atrocities? It’s this. All of them were captured on civilian phone video, and live streamed to the world. There were brave, anonymous citizens who whipped out their cell phones, cued in, and memorialized for the world what really happened. And the GOP hates that.

After all, they don’t want their killer cops exposed for dishing out a little street justice. They wanted them protected to keep their racist cops on the streets and bustin’ heads. And they weren’t taking this new threat laying down either.

And as a result, over the last couple of years, GOP controlled state legislatures and local city councils have set out to fix that little blip. They have passed laws that criminalize a private American citizen for recording and live streaming video of police interactions. They are seeking to prosecute you and I for broadcasting the truth about police-civilian interactions.

Fortunately that isn’t going over so well, legally speaking, and that’s why I have a joyful lump in my throat as I type this. Because the courts aren’t booting their bullshit.

According to reporting today in The Hill, 

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that a North Carolina town’s policy that allegedly banned video live-streaming police during traffic stops was in violation of the First Amendment.

Can you say Hallelujah, my brothers an. The case doesn’t deal with any of the cases I described above, but the benefit is the same. The case stems from a traffic stop in North Carolina, and I want to quote it here, because I have a point to make afterwards;

The ruling stated that Dijon Sharpe was live-streaming his traffic stop on Facebook Live when police officer Myers Helms attempted to take his phone away because he said live-streaming threatened his safety. Sharpe then sued the Winterville police officers in their official capacity for having a policy that violates the First Amendment, and also sued Helms individually.

Here’s ny point. The 4th Circuit Appellate Court ruled that the officer violated the drivers 1st Amendment rights by attempting to stop the live streaming. Let me ask you a question. Does this ring a bell? Get your whiskers twitching? Nag at something in your memory?

How about a young black woman named Sandra Bland? She was a vibrant 28 year old black woman who was puled over in Texas for the mortal sin of failing to properly signal a turn. The stop was confrontational from the start, but when Bland refused to put out her cigarette, and the cop realized that she was live streaming the stop, he went full Rambo. He hauled her out of the car, screaming at her, threw her around, cuffed her and took her to the station, where she was found allegedly found hanged three days later.

A personal aside. Fuck the Supreme Court! This is what real justice looks like in the United States. This a federal court panel of judges, with blinders on, balancing the right of everyday American citizens against the might of the US constitution, and doing the right thing. We may not be able to count on the Supreme Court for ultimate justice, but 95% of cases never reach the Supreme Court. And as for the rest? It appears that the American judiciary is doing just fine, thank you very much.