Can I record police officers performing their duties in public?

You generally have the right to photograph anyone and everyone that is in public. And you don't have to stop if they ask you to. That said, a cop might find that you are somehow interfering with his duties. And a judge might agree. There's no big list of what counts as "interfering" as what doesn't written up somewhere. Probably not, though. A judge would be likely to agree that the arrest was unjustified. But the cop would probably be immune to any lawsuit based on the qualified immunity of gov't officials who reasonably believe they are acting legally. Always remember: Cops are not lawyers. Cops do not make up the law. What a cop says isn't the law. Cops have to follow the law. And a cop is not in the business of meting out punishment.

You are perfectly within your rights to videotape police officers in public, from a distance in which you are not interfering with their duties. In some places you may be forbidden to make an audio record, however. But I strongly recommend that you have multiple people with you, and that at least one person's camera is hidden, if possible, so that when an officer kicks the shit out of you - and if you tape enough of them, one will - you have proof that you didn't just clumsily trip into the officer's baton then grab his pepper spray and apply it directly to your cornea with a q-tip.

Herc, I also disagree with your point about Police searching your car. There are nuances, but if you get pulled over and the cop asks to search your car, I'm personally for always always always saying no. No matter how harshly he phrases it, unless he has probable cause, he is still asking your permission and cannot go forward without it. Perhaps a repeat, but I hope all Americans will read and know http://www.aclu.org/police/gen/14528res20040730.html (and the same for everyone else).

Dreama, I'm afraid the rights you have by reason of your existence are pretty much limited to the right to die. Persons in, say - China - would be foolish to try and exercise many of the rights that the U.S. Constitution guarantees its citizens. The other side of the coin is that if no one in the U.S. exercises a particular right, as time passes it becomes harder to preserve that right. If everyone always bows to police authority, that authority will ignore rights, whether they are Constitutionally-guaranteed or not.

herc, I'm pretty sure you're wrong. If they can see a gun or crackpipe in plain view on your dash or back seat, then they've got probable cause to search the rest of the car, but they can't just search under your seats or in the glove compartment for no reason. A burned out tail light or speeding violation won't cut it. Check http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/53664#808666 and link for more info.

Thanks for all the replies. The sense I've gotten, which I had dreaded but should have expected, is that it's irrelevant whether filming police officers is legal. The only thing that matters to 99% of people (that is, those without infinite time, money, and patience to fight it out in court) is whether it'll get them arrested and thrown in jail. And it appears that filming a police officer will lead to that.

I also think it's a bit like refusing to allow officers to search your car: you're entirely within your rights to refuse it, but your refusal will be construed as awfully suspicious. I may be wrong, but I think that officers have the authority to search your car, glove compartment included (but the trunk is off limits w/out probable cause to search). Officer safety being the justifcation, and a limited expectation of privacy w/in a car being the excuse. So if the cop has cause to pull you over, likely the cop has permission to search your car; resisting likely won't help your cause.

There are these things called Constitutions. They give you rights; judges don't. Actually, there are these things called Constitutions. They guarantee your rights, they don't give them to you, they're yours as a matter of your existence.

First, IANAL, nor even someone with an intricate working of the legal system. (My main claims to any sort of legal experience are listening to a police scanner a lot and writing the newspaper's police logs for my college campus... Neither of which permits me to give very sound advice.) I think it'd be very hard to prove that the officer had no reason to stop you in the first place, even though, from the sound of it, he really didn't. He could lie and say that he had seen the bottle. Or, as happened to one of my friends, claim that you matched the description of someone who had just committed a crime. Or maybe he could say he was just getting out for a breath of fresh air, coincidentally near you guys, but you acted suspiciously when he stopped, and thus he investigated. From the section you pasted, it sounds like the issue of whether you had to identify yourself hinged upon whether or not he had reason to believe you had committed a crime. This kind of comes back to the point I just made: even if he really didn't, it wouldn't have been hard for him to make something up. But I also think it's a bit like refusing to allow officers to search your car: you're entirely within your rights to refuse it, but your refusal will be construed as awfully suspicious. You'd probably have just escalated the problems if you'd refused to show him ID. I'm 99% confident that you were within your rights to videotape him in public. As an official of the government, or really, just anyone in public, he had no reasonable expectation of privacy. Again, though, when asked by a cop to stop, it's really in your best interest to oblige. Hypothetically, he could probably also try to stick you with charges of disobeying a police officer. The last bit is that, from working with my campus police force do to the police logs, I've come to realize that they have enormous discretion in what ends up happening to people. In the instance of people being caught with marijuana, for example, most people are just 'prosecuted' through the school, but there was one incident this semester with some people who were real jerks to the officers and kept maintaining that they, "Knew their rights." They ended up being taken into custody and criminally charged with several different offenses. So, long story short: you might have been within your rights to not show ID, and you almost certainly would have been within your rights to keep videotaping. But that doesn't mean that you wouldn't spent a night in jail and have to go to court to fight a bunch of BS charges. I think you did the right thing in complying with his wishes.