Your personal video can no longer get you put in the pokey by the police

During the two-plus decades I have paid attention to our political people and the way they govern, I have seen some hard-core partisan actions taken. I’ve seen mean-spirited acts meant to single out certain segments of society for abuse.

The high court on Thursday saved us from our Legislature's worst instincts.

Yet the thing that allows me to continue to have faith in our form of government is that it often seems that sense and decency prevail. Someone comes along to do the “proper” thing.

SUCH AS WHAT happened Thursday with the Illinois Supreme Court, which issued a ruling that struck down the eavesdropping laws that were enacted a few years ago that made so much of everyday observation a criminal act.

As it turns out, part of the law was already struck down – the part that made it a crime to record anything involving the police. Legislators who approved creation of that stupid law claimed people were using all those newfangled cameras in their cell phones to catch the police in improper acts.

Which meant the police were under constant supervision that could inhibit them from doing their jobs.

These are the kind of people who think the real problem with that Rodney King police beating in Los Angeles in the early 1990s was that some smart-aleck happened to record it with a video camera.

CATCHING THE POLICE in improper behavior? They were just doing their jobs, some would have us believe.

Now, the entirety of the law is struck down. The people who were eager to protect government officials from being caught in their own incompetence have been determined to have gone too far.

In this case, the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of Annabel Melongo, who had objections with a court transcript in a case she was involved with. She had several telephone conversations with a court reporter supervisor at the Criminal Courts Building, and she recorded at least three of them.

In Melongo’s case, she made the recordings because she wanted to make an issue of what she saw as the court reporter’s incompetence. She created a website where she wrote about her problem, and included snippets of the recordings she had on the website.

PROSECUTORS USED THE law to determine that Melongo WAS the problem. She had six counts of eavesdropping filed against her. A jury ultimately could not reach a verdict, and the charges eventually were dismissed.

But because such a high bond was set against this “threat” to our society, she spent about 20 months in jail while the criminal case was pending.

Naturally, this case was filed by the state’s attorney’s office, which claimed that the problem was in the jury that wouldn’t give them a “guilty” verdict. They wanted the charges reinstated.

Their attorneys actually argued before the state Supreme Court that the intent of the Legislature (which was to favor the actions of law enforcement and other legal system types over those of the public) had to be respected, and that trying to alter it was outside of their legal authority.

IT SEEMS THE court didn’t buy into that argument.

“Judged in terms of the legislative purpose of protecting conversational privacy, the statute’s scope is simply too broad,” read the opinion issued unanimously by the state’s high court.

Which many of would have come to the conclusion back when the Legislature (in the Rod Blagojevich days) gave its approval to this measure.

Particularly since if strictly interpreted, it could make any tourist a criminal if – while in the process of taking pictures in the Loop – they happened to catch a glimpse of a cop or two in the background. Which isn’t exactly an impossibility.

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Arrogance at work?!?

It never fails to amuse me whenever the subject of surreptitious telephone recordings comes up.

For it seems the Chicago Tribune had some of its telephone interviews with city officials recorded by the city without the reporter-types being made aware of it first.

OF COURSE, MAYOR Rahm Emanuel is trying to dismiss the matter as “much adieu about nothing.” After all, it was the city that potentially violated Illinois law that says recordings of telephone calls can only be legal if all parties involved in the call are aware of the recording taking place.

He’d probably be screaming and screeching for prosecution if it was the Tribune-types who had turned on the tape recorder (even though most of the recording devices I see these days don’t use tape of any kind) and recorded city officials.

Personally, I prefer not to use audio recording devices when I report. In part because I can keep up with conversations with my written (or sometimes, typed) notes.

But also because making a recording of an interview then means that one has to listen to the whole thing and make a transcript of sorts, before the writing process can begin.

IT REALLY TAKES far too much time – particularly when one is on deadline. By taking notes by hand, I find I listen more closely to an interview while it takes place; and can usually pick out the parts that I would want to quote.

So this isn’t an issue I encounter too often. Although it does now have me wondering just how many of my telephone calls to city officials (or other governmental units) still exist on audio – if ever anyone were ambitious enough to take the time to listen to all the hours of conversations that may have taken place.

They’d probably become so bored that they’d turn into drones long before anything of interest was actually said.

In this particular case, it seems that city officials are admitting that Tribune reporter-types were recorded while interviewing Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy just over a year ago. City officials are trying to downplay this as an inadvertent recording, and not some regular policy on the part of the Chicago Police Department or municipal government in general.

I SUPPOSE WE really don’t know how truthful that is – although to tell you the truth, I usually figure that just about any call made to a law enforcement agency has the potential to be recorded.

Some departments are at least honest enough to give you the warning that your telephone call is being recorded – so that in theory you can hang up before actually saying anything.

Just in case you actually have a legitimate reason to not want to have your voice recorded on tape. Which ultimately is your own business, and not anyone else’s!

I would have an easier time accepting the city’s take on this issue as not being all that significant, EXCEPT for the fact that I can pretty much envision how bent out of shape those same city officials would get if they thought someone was recording them.

I STILL RECALL one moment from when I worked for United Press International and had to interview a prosecutor by telephone in one of the rural Indiana counties that’s not really a part of the Chicago-area, but is close enough to warrant some attention.

That particular prosecutor wound up saying nothing of significance and in fact was convinced I was recording his voice – even though I wasn’t.

What really bothered him was when he heard the clacking of my typing on a computer keyboard (I was taking notes of our conversation), and he tried to argue that even a written record constituted an illegal recording of our ultimately pointless interview.

I have no doubt that if city officials could somehow turn this issue around against the Chicago Tribune, they’d do so in an instant! Even though this may well be a petty instance, it probably is something where we all ought to be concerned.

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When is a recording an intrusion?

I’m not sure what to think of all these devices people carry that are more than capable of recording those innocent and trivial moments that, if excepted in a certain way, can come across as incriminating – or embarrassing.

I was pleased to learn that a jury in Cook County on Wednesday rejected the idea that a woman who recorded the activity of police officers trying to intimidate her was the one who actually committed a crime – one that could have gotten her up to a 15-year prison sentence.

BUT THERE’S ALSO this commercial that is popping up on television a lot these days – for the HTC Status phone. That’s the device that comes with special buttons and functions that make it easy for people to take pictures with their mobile phone, then instantly post them to their Facebook accounts more easily than they already can do with their current portable phones.

In my mind, I have dubbed this device the “phone for idiots” and would definitely not want to buy one – because the commercial shows a couple of snickering morons who seem to have nothing better to do than to take pictures of their so-called friend while he sleeps; then post them onto Facebook for public consumption so they can embarrass him.

Somewhere along the line, we’re going to have to figure out some sort of legal standard for what is appropriate behavior for those people who feel compelled to whip out their phone and make recordings of what everybody around them is doing.

What’s the matter? Aren’t these people the least bit interesting, in and of themselves?

APPARENTLY NOT!

But then we run into the other extreme, which is what came up in that case against Tiawanda Moore. She’s the Indiana resident who thought that a Chicago police officer treated her in a way that constituted sexual harassment.

She did what any person is supposed to do if they believe that a police officer in Chicago has misbehaved professionally – she took it to Internal Affairs, the division that investigates such complaints and decides if the bad conduct rises to the level of criminal charges, or just professional punishment.

Of course, Internal Affairs has developed a reputation (not always justified) for being more interested in covering up complaints, rather than finding police wrong-doing. In Moore’s case, she believes the two officers were more interested in intimidating her into dropping her complaint.

THAT IS WHEN she grabbed her BlackBerry, pushed the buttons that allow for audio recording, and managed to capture a few minutes of their questioning of her for posterity.

That is what got her in legal trouble, since Illinois law not only makes it wrong for people to record the words of others without their knowledge, it makes it a  criminal act to record the police.

Law enforcement officials say their concern is that people will record the police either on audio or in moving pictures, then will selectively edit the audio and/or video in ways that would support whatever complaints they would want to file against the Police Department.

Which probably does fit into the mentality of those people who believe that the real “crime” when it comes to Rodney King being beaten by the Los Angeles police back in the early 1990s was that someone who lived nearby pulled out his video camera and recorded the beating without the police knowledge.

GROUPS SUCH AS the American Civil Liberties Union say they think the law is meant to cover up anyone who might catch the police behaving improperly, and they have a lawsuit pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago to challenge it.

Meanwhile, an attorney for another defendant facing charges similar to Moore told the Chicago Tribune that laws restricting personal video or audio recordings are “antiquated” in an age when so many people carry miniature devices that are capable of making such recordings.

Which is a statement that I have some personal qualms about.

I’d hate to think that the idea of respecting someone’s privacy is “antiquated.” Then again, I’d hate to think that the police-desired standard is truly acceptable.

WHICH IS WHY I was pleased to learn that it took a jury just about one hour to make their ruling in favor of Moore, with one juror telling the Chicago Tribune that they listened to the audio and actually agreed with Moore’s perception that the Internal Affairs investigators were “intimidating and insensitive” and that charges against Moore were, “a waste of time.”

Of course, I’m sure those people who support such a law think that the jury overstepped their boundaries in making  such a judgment call – and should have accepted the existence of a four-minute audio snippet of police officers without their knowledge as being improper, in-and-of itself.

But the fact that some people would try to defend this law with a “Letter of the Law” defense instead of claiming that the merits of the law are proper ought to be evidence enough that we in Illinois have a flawed law in need of revamping.

Because somehow, we in Illinois need to find that middle ground between thinking that some people being recorded is a felony offense and thinking that everybody being recorded (with silly pictures all over Facebook) is somehow proper.

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