The Art of Submarine Warfare

[Greg Broiles]

At 01:22 PM 6/22/2001 -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote:

>      Listen to it again -- doesn't she say "I'm recording this"??

Yes, she does - but the recorder would either have been on her person (in 
which case it would have been taken from her before she was sitting in the 
back of the police car), or in her car.

In either case, it wouldn't have been in a good position to get a nice 
clear audio recording of the final part where the two cops stand on the 
roadside and talk about whether or not they can seize her reading material 
as evidence on the obstructing justice charge.

The only way you're going to get nice clear audio like that is if the cop 
has a lapel mike with a wireless transmitter, and they're pretty common 
among cops now, especially among highway patrol/state troopers, who make a 
lot of traffic stops and DUI stops (where they can usually control 
positioning of their car/camera vis-a-vis the suspect and their car), which 
are ripe for automated evidence recording from a dash-mounted video camera 
+ short-range radio transmitter/mike combination. City cops spend more of 
their time farther away from their cars, in buildings, etc - so city police 
departments usually put A/V equipment in  special DUI task force cars 
instead of in every car.

It's also not uncommon for cops who want their own recording, or for less 
well-funded departments, to use an old-fashioned microcassette recorder on 
the cop's duty belt or in a chest pocket where the built-in mic can get 
pretty good audio.

I'm very confident that the video is from the trooper's own car - because 
of the positioning, because of the "VSP", because you can see the push bar 
on the cop car's front bumper at the bottom of the frame, and because I'm 
really skeptical that someone else with a video camera would be able to get 
close enough to get that shot without being run off by the cops, unless 
they used a strong zoom lens, which are hard to keep stable - even on a 
tripod - unless you've got really nice + heavy equipment. Besides, assuming 
that's true, where's the cop car? We can tell it's behind the woman's car, 
because you can see its flashing lights reflected on the troopers' uniforms 
and on the street signs - so it's near the camera. If the car is in between 
the camera and the woman's car, why didn't we see it or its lights? Or if 
the camera is in between the cop car and the woman's car, why didn't the 
cops see the camera during the encounter .. especially given that the 
camera's not on the ground hidden in (apparently) a scrap of roadside 
trash, or else we'd see a really different perspective.

Ok, maybe someone set up thousands of dollars of nice video equipment in a 
duck blind or something and then hid across the street with a parabolic 
mike to get the audio .. because they knew this was going to happen?

Occam's Razor says this recording was made by the cops.

Not that the identity of the party making the recording diminishes the 
constitutional issues here about unreasonable search & seizure, right to 
remain silent, right to freely read & associate & travel, etc., under both 
the US and VA constitutions.

On the other hand, if you're driving you can be asked to produce a drivers' 
license, and cops can ask you to identify yourself if you're out in public 
- but they must accept your oral self-report regarding your identity, and 
can't arrest you for not carrying "your papers", unless you're in a class 
of persons who must carry their papers, like some non-citizens and people 
who are driving. If this was meant to be some sort of test case or 
demonstration of police misconduct, it gets off to a bad start that way - I 
don't know if everything that followed is justifiable under VA law, but 
they weren't out of line (in a non-Choate universe, anyway) asking for her 
drivers' license if they saw her driving that car. I didn't see anything 
that looked to me like obstructing an officer or assaulting an officer.


--
Greg Broiles
gbroiles at well.com
"Organized crime is the price we pay for organization." -- Raymond Chandler