State Supreme Court rules recording police legal, local agencies foresee little change

• Tweet
• 

A recent Michigan Supreme Court ruling could cause some changes for police officers and how they deal with civilians recording them on the job.

The court ruled in March that police do not have any expectations of a right of privacy on duty in terms of being recorded.

Jeff Browne, Mount Pleasant Police public information officer, said the ruling will not affect the department very much since officers are recorded on video in their vehicles anyway.

“Any time I go out and I’m doing my job, wherever it may be, people have a cell phone. Cell phone has what capability? Recording, photographs, all that type of stuff,” Browne said. “It could potentially happen at any point in time that we can be recorded.”

The case was sparked from a 2000 incident when rapper Dr. Dre was on tour in Detroit. While on tour, he was interrupted by police and was told he could not run explicit content contained in his video.

The conversation with police was recorded and used in Dr. Dre’s tour video. As a result, the rapper was sued by the officers for violation of privacy.

“The use of video is certainly much more mainstream nowadays than it was five years ago,” said Isabella County Prosecutor Larry Burdick. “Almost all the cars have video cameras. A lot of statements taken from suspects are on video now.”

Browne said any time he has dealt with people, especially on Main Street, he will commonly see people using cell phones or camcorders when someone is arrested.

Isabella County Sheriff Leo Mioduszewski said recording police is a useful tool, but there are negatives as well.

“It could very well affect their jobs, depending on what situation they’re in,” Mioduszewski said. “It could cause problems with undercover police investigations.”

He said officers usually do not want interviews with informants to be exposed to the public. Video cameras within vehicles are used in a positive manner, he said.

“We have citizens complain about police officers, and we’re lucky enough to have it on video,” Mioduszewski said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, it shows that the police officers didn’t do anything wrong. Once in a while, it will show something.”