Republican Governor Makes It Harder To Film Police In Arizona

Arizona's Republican governor Doug Ducey has signed legislation into law that bans the filming of police officers within 8 feet. This may seem like a reasonable distance, but when it comes to having video evidence of police misconduct, 8 feet can feel like a mile and allow things to be obscured just enough to prevent evidence from being filmed. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains why this legislation is such a bad idea.

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

Beginning on September 24th this year, if you're in the state of Arizona and you see police officers doing anything, it will be illegal to get closer than eight feet to them to film them. That is of course, new legislation that was recently signed into law by Arizona's Republican governor Doug Ducey. So this legislation was put forward by Republican, uh, state representative, John Kavanaugh, who, as he says originally wanted to make it 15 feet. You couldn't give within 15 feet of police officers, you know, for the safety of the officers, we don't want them getting distracted by people filming, but he, he lowered it down to eight feet cuz he thought 15 feet would be unconstitutional. Whereas eight feet totally constitutional. I'm not sure why the seven foot difference suddenly becomes against the constitution. Um, I would think that any distance, if, if any distance is unconstitutional, then any distance is unconstitutional.

So I'm not sure where in the Arizona constitution it says, yo no, there's a seven foot, uh, gap there. So it's a stupid piece of legislation, but I will say this before I go into fully attacking it. I do understand a little bit of that rationale, right? When there are more people involved, if the police are in a dangerous situation, people, you know, right up next to 'em filming could be distracting not to mention the fact that people getting too close to certain situations could put the individual filming it in danger. So I understand that, but I don't agree with it because what this legislation is about is not about keeping civilians safe. It's not about keeping police officers safe. It's about making sure that people can't get too close to really see what's going on. If you've ever taken a video with a cell phone, if you're in a crowded area and you're trying to get something on footage, you know, and there's commotion a kerfuffle, a a struggle like police officers, we often see on the videos, eight feet may as well be a mile bodies can obstruct.

You know, police can be doing things with their hands that you can't see. They can be touching the victim in a way, harming the victim and you can't see it because you're eight feet away. But if you're closer, you could. I mean, we have seen that plenty of times with these, uh, videos of officers that have emerged in recent years. And without that video footage that we have seen that goes viral online. Many of these police officers, Derek Chauvin, uh, included probably wouldn't have been convicted. I say probably definitely wouldn't have been convicted without the video evidence. And this legislation is meant to cut down on that. This is to protect police, but not from being distracted it's to protect them from prosecution when they are the ones who become the criminals in those situations. That's what this legislation is all about.