Florida Republicans Want To Make It ILLEGAL To Film Police Officers

Republicans in the state of Florida want to make it illegal to film police officers in the line of duty, and the legislation has already been drafted. The legislation as written would make it a 2nd degree misdemeanor to film police officers IF the officers believe that the filming is somehow hindering their work. In other words, it would be up to a cop's discretion whether or not the filming is actually an interference, and we can all guess how that's going to go down. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains the danger of this proposed legislation.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Republicans here in the state of Florida want to make it illegal for citizens to film police officers while the police officers are working. House bill 11, which was filed by Republican representative, Alex Rizo from Hialeah, would make it a second degree misdemeanor charge for anyone who is hindering law enforcement officers, as they carry out their duties. And that could include taking cell phone video if law enforcement believes that recording is interfering with their ability to do their job, people could be charged if they seek to interrupt, disrupt, hinder, impede, or interfere with the officers performing their duties, provoke physical responses from the officers, or harass the officers. Anyone who comes within 30 feet of an officer after being warned to stay away would be arrested. So think of all the footage we have seen over the last few years of police officers, I don't know, murdering people, shooting people at point blank range with rubber bullets, like happened last weekend, or otherwise physically assaulting people as they're basically being detained, all of that would become illegal under this Florida law.

If this had been the law of the land, Derek Chauvin would still be a police officer. George Floyd would still be dead, but Chauvin would still be a police officer. Nobody would know what happened that day. If there's not video evidence and hell, a lot of times, even if there is video evidence, the cops get away with it scot-free. The only difference is at least if there's video evidence, we know how corrupt these pigs can be sometimes. And by pigs, I mean the ones going out there and murdering people. Right. But we wouldn't have any of this, we'd have none of it if there wasn't the video and that is exactly why this law is being proposed in the state of Florida. And of course they're doing it in the state of Florida because they know they have a good chance of being successful. Republican controlled state House, Republican controlled state, Senate, Republican governor. If Republicans want this to be the law of the land, at least here in the state of Florida, they can make it happen like that.

This piece of legislation is not going to be taken up actually until the 2022 Senate session. And if passed at that point, it would then become law in October of 2022. So there is still time. There is still time to put pressure on these lawmakers. There's still time to raise a fuss about this, raise awareness about it and get people energized about what is happening down here in the state of Florida, because I can promise you if they can successfully pull this off in the state of Florida, they're going to start trying it in other states across the country. Some of them already have. Florida would be the big giant test case for them though. And what this means is there would be more murders, more abuse and we would have absolutely no evidence. It would be the officer's word against the person they killed. And guess which side the courts will almost always go with.