Police Officer Threatens To Run Over Protester for Filming on the Sidewalk
As longtime Reason readers are aware, police officers often don’t like to be filmed by the public.
Recently, an officer in Pennsylvania got so fed up with being recorded that he drove his car on the sidewalk and threatened to run over a civilian, for the offense of filming on public property.
Courts have broadly held that civilians may legally record the police, so long as they don’t physically interfere with officers doing their job. Even so, some officers chafe at the extra scrutiny: In recent years, officers have played copyrighted music in an attempt to keep the videos from being shared online. While underhanded, this is at least a relative improvement over the alternative, when officers would simply grab the phones from people’s hands and arrest or pepper-spray them.
Between 2015 and 2021, the city of Allentown, Pennsylvania, paid out more than $2 million to settle 14 cases of excessive force by the police. Some of those cases involved police hostility to civilians doing nothing more than filming.
In October 2014, Allentown police arrested a college student, punching and tasing him in the process, for not providing his name even after they had taken his ID; they then arrested Eli Heckman, who was recording the arrest nearby, and smashed his phone. The city later settled with each of them, paying the student $95,000 and paying Heckman $45,000.
Unfortunately, it seems Allentown’s police haven’t learned their lesson.
Phil Rishel started recording Allentown officers with his cell phone as a form of protest in 2023, often while standing on the sidewalk outside the precinct. Things came to a head one day in March 2024, as Rishel filmed near the parking garage. In a video Rishel shot that day, an officer—later identified as Dean Flyte—can be seen walking o
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