Posted by: Carlos Miller in Bad
Cop, No Donut, Citizen Journalism, Court Settlements, PINAC News, PINAC News
Top 3, Police Abuse, Recording the Police, The Blue Line December 26, 2014 47
Comments
A Florida man who was arrested
last year for video recording Orlando police making an arrest received a
$15,000 settlement this month.
His lawyers, however, might end
up making three times that much for working his case.
And the cop who arrested him,
seizing his phone as “evidence” as well as seizing another bystanders’s phone
remains on the job as if nothing had happened.
The only difference is that
Orlando police officer Peter Delio is now expected to follow a new departmental
policy requiring officers to respect the rights of citizens to record them in
public.
In other words, he is now
mandated by the department to follow the law.
But Delio has a long history of
complaints against him for being rude and abusive, so we shouldn’t expect him
to change his ways.
At least Alberto Troche is
$15,000 richer after having spent 15 hours in jail and having to wait three
weeks for them to return his phone last December.
According to the Orlando
Sentinel:
Troche and the city agreed to a
$15,000 settlement several weeks ago, according to federal court records.
Now, his lawyers have asked a
U.S. magistrate to make the city pay another $44,000 for the hours they worked
on the case.
The Orlando Police Department
has also changed its policies on how to handle people who video-record them in
action, said Troche’s attorney, J Marc Jones.
Officers may not order members
of the public to stop video-recording them or arrest or try to stop them, so
long as they are in a public place, have not crossed a police line and are not
interfering, according to a policy directive signed by Police Chief John Mina
two months after Troche filed suit.
Officers also may not demand
that a person recording them identify themselves, may not demand to know why
they are making the recording and may not intentionally block or obstruct their
camera, according to the directive.
“A bystander has the right
under the First Amendment to observe and record … (police officers) in public
discharge their duties,” the directive says.
