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Last week, a major federal court ruling on privacy rights highlighted the flawed, police-centric way that we typically talk about public safety. In a divided decision, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals barred Baltimore police from using a new aerial surveillance program to indiscriminately target and track peoples movements. Analyzing data collected through the so-called spy plane program, the court said, counts as a search under the Fourth Amendment, and therefore requires police to obtain a warrant, just as when searching a home. Its a cutting-edge decision that comes as courts increasingly grapple with how the Fourth Amendments protections against police intrusions apply to new surveillance technology.

But the case is also important for the debate it sparked among the courts judges. In dissent, Judge J. Harvey Wilkinson III, a Reagan appointee, said that restricting police surveillance will tie the citys hands against a serious public safety crisis. He accused the majority of ignoring Baltimores high murder rate and said the ruling leaves only hopelessness for the good people of Baltimore, especially our dispossessed communities where rates of gun violence are highest.

Judge Roger Gregory, the first Black judge to ever serve on the Fourth Circuit, was having none of it. In response, he explained how this critique depends upon a certain premise: Policing ameliorates violence, and restraining police authority exacerbates it. As surely as water is wet, as where there is smoke there is fire, the dissent takes for granted that policing is the antidote to killing. Thus, the dissent repeatedly evokes the grief and trauma of gun deaths only in the name of a familiar cause: police and prisons.

The dissents rhetoric matches that of police chiefs clamoring for bigger budgets, particularly amid a one-year national jump in shootings. But the same assumptions are standard fare in reporting on crime and politics. Last week, for example, the New York Times equated calls for funding the police with treating public safety as a central political concern and adopting themes of public safety. The framing both reduces the concept of safety to narrow criminogenic terms (safety depends entirely on crime rates) and elevates punitive responses to crime and violence (more police, more arrests, and more incarceration) over policies that would invest in communities and promote overall health.

In his concurrence, Judge Gregory emphasized that such a blinkered view misunderstands the structural causes of violence and the futility of policing in addressing them. I am skeptical that [the dissents] logic genuinely respects and represents the humanity, dignity, and lived experience of those the dissent ventures to speak for, he wrote. Segregation effectively plundered Baltimores Black neighborhoodstransferring wealth, public resources, and investment to their white counterpartsand the consequences persist today. . . . So it is no coincidence that gun violence mostly occurs in the portions of the city that never recovered from state-sanctioned expropriation. Absent reinvestment, cycles of poverty and crime have proliferated.

Rather than reinvesting in dispossessed communities, Gregory wrote, the city over-polices them: Baltimore spends more on policing, per capita, than virtually any other comparable city in America, and in 2017, for example, a greater proportion of its general operating fund spending was allocated to policing than to education, transportation, and housing combined.

Gregorys opinion aligns with public health experts who have been calling for a more accurate and equitable conception of public safety, one that includes overall health and well-being and considers the damage that our systems of punishment inflict. Last month, anthropologist and physician Eric Reinhart argued in Health Affairs that redefining public safety to account for the harms of policing and incarceration rather than continuing to cede this influential discourse to reductive criminological terms is key for ensuring health, security, equality, and positive freedom for all U.S. residents.

As law professor John Pfaff wrote in The New Republic last week, our criminal legal system produces tremendous harm and immiseration, even death, not just for [incarcerated people] but for their families and communities. In a damning indictment of our fundamental indifference to the lives of the millions who come in contact with this system, we have no idea what the criminal legal systems actual humanitarian costs are, but they are surely staggering.

Even with incomplete information, we know that police killings are a leading cause of death for young Black men, and that police violence sends tens of thousands of people to the emergency room every year. We also know, as Reinhart writes, that jails and prisons inflict increased rates of chronic diseases that impose long-term medical needs and cost and reduce life expectancy. Even pretrial detention without a conviction, enforces persistent economic hardships and drives high rates of unemployment, homelessness, and food insecurity.

Beyond that, a growing body of researchwhat Reinhart calls carceral-community epidemiologyshows that incarceration spreads disease and increases mortality rates in surrounding communities, that our world-leading proclivity for incarceration, while disproportionately harmful to nonwhite people and dispossessed communities, is killing us all. Given their often poor conditions and porous nature, with high turnover and the constant churn of staff and visitors, jails and prisons are not like Vegas: What happens there does not stay there. Carceral institutions worldwide have long functioned as disease multipliers and epidemiological pumps for surrounding communities in relation to HIV, tuberculosis, hepatitis C, influenza, and other infectious diseases, Reinhart wrote.

This reality has been of acute importance throughout the pandemic. In May, Reinhart co-authored a study concluding that cycling individuals through Cook County Jail in March 2020 alone accounted for 13 percent of all COVID-19 cases and 21 percent of racial COVID-19 disparities in Chicago as of early August. Their analysis also showed that jail cycling is the strongest predictor of COVID-19 rates, considerably exceeding poverty, race, and population density.

Other research shows that sending more people to county jails leads to higher rates of premature community death. In February, a retrospective, longitudinal study in The Lancet examined cause-specific mortality at the county level in the U.S. over a 30-year period. It found a short-term association between county jail incarceration and mortality, with mortality due to infectious disease, chronic lower respiratory disease, substance use, and suicide as the strongest drivers. The study put the problem explicitly in public health terms, noting the risks of community-level exposure to high incarceration rates, as though the county jail was polluted water or a toxic waste site.

One of the studys authors, Sandhya Kajeepeta, a doctoral student in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University, told me that research framing public safety more broadly to include public health and long-term well-being really challenges our reliance on jails and prisons to keep people safe.

For Reinhart, the effort to reclaim and redefine the influential rhetoric of public safety must make clear that collective safety is best improved not by policing and prisons but rather by building robust public systems of carethat is, of economic security, environmental protections, labor rights, and housing.

Thats also the view of Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, the grassroots advocacy organization that challenged the Baltimore surveillance program. Lawrence Grandpre, the groups director of research, wrote that their opposition to more surveillance was neither anti-police, nor born of indifference to gun violence. Instead, he wrote, we believe that safety is not simply the absence of violence, but the creation of conditions for human flourishing. Thus, we refuse the false . . . choice between community instability created by violent crime, with the community instability caused by mass incarceration, unaccountable policing, and the slow starving of our community institutions to feed a [half] billion-dollar police budget deemed to be the only investment our community needs.

Policing Is Not Public Safety

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Policing Is Not 'Public Safety' - The Appeal

Earlier this month, Adam Klein, the outgoing chair of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, took the unusual step of issuing a unilateral Chairmans White Paper on oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, based on PCLOBs review of 19 FISA applications for electronic surveillance of U.S. persons in counterterrorism investigations. This is in itself notable, given how tightly restricted access to the applications underlying FISA surveillance has historically been. Until 2018, when a redacted version of the applications to monitor former Trump advisor Carter Page was declassified, the general public had never seen one. When an unprecedented deep-dive review of the Page applications by the Justice Departments Inspector General uncovered serious deficiencies in that process, this fact took on sudden salience: Nobody could be certain whether the problems were sui generis of a larger pattern of errors and omissions. Predictably, alas, Kleins discussion of the substantive contents of the applications PCLOB reviewed is largely redacted, but the report does offer some helpful procedural analysis and some welcome, but ultimately rather conservative, proposals for reform.

The Inspector Generals report on the Page FISA process had found fault with the Justice Departments vaunted Woods Procedures, designed to ensure that each factual claim in an application submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has documentary support in the FBIs case file. The IG found not only mismatches between the applications and case file, or claims without documentary support butfar more troublingmaterial omissions of facts that weighed against the FBIs assessment that Page had acted as an agent of a foreign power. The most egregious of these occurred in the later renewal applications. Having satisfied the FISC that it had met its probable cause burden on this question in the initial application, the FBI seems to have shown little interest in revisiting whether that assessment remained tenable on the totality of the evidence as new information came in that contradicted or complicated its earlier understanding.

In response, as Klein notes, the Justice Department in mid-2020 began supplementing its accuracy reviews of a sample of applications with completeness reviewsof which it had completed 95 as of March 2021. While this represents only a fraction of the hundreds or (more often) thousands of FISA orders sought each year, it is nevertheless a nontrivial sample, and Klein observes that both the accuracy and completeness reviews absorb significant resources and person-hours. He reasonably suggests prioritizing for review applications targeting U.S. persons, and above those sought in cases designated as Sensitive Investigative Matters because they raise heightened civil liberties or separation of powers concernsbecause, for instance, they involve political actors, religious organizations, or the press. While this is hard to dispute as a general heuristic for allocating scarce resources, it does merit an asterisk: While much of the public discourse around FISA treats collection on U.S. person targets as the sole subject of concern, non-U.S. person FISA targets often communicate with U.S. persons, and the extent to which those communications have broader implications for domestic liberties or politics may not be readily apparent in advance of collection. One reason electronic surveillance is such a singularly intrusive tactic is that it inherently involves searching the communications of hundreds or thousands of (ex ante unknown) parties other than the specific target. Even if we are exclusively concerned about the privacy rights of U.S. citizens and permanent residentsitself a mistake if we understand privacy as a human rightthe status of the target is at best imperfectly correlated with those equities.

Klein also notes a gulf between the Inspector Generals assessment of the overall accuracy of FISA applications and that of the Justice Department. An audit by the IGs officeissued in March 2020 found some form of error in every application it reviewedand in some cases dozensconcluding that this deficiency in the FBIs efforts to support the factual statements in FISA applications through its Woods Procedures undermines the FBIs ability to achieve its scrupulously accurate standard for FISA applications. DOJ, however, countered in a filing with the FISA Court that many of these were trivial or even merely typographical errors, and that of the tiny number of material errors they were prepared to concede, none undermined the overall probable cause showing. Klein proposes, again sensibly, a schema for categorizing errors identified during review, ranging from the most seriousmisrepresentations or omissions of material information known to the government at the time the application was preparedto the presumably less urgent spelling errors and typos.

Most importantly, in my view, Klein urges reevaluation of the process by which FISA renewal applications are prepared. The most serious defects identified by the IG in the Carter Page applications came in the later renewals, which omitted numerous salient facts that weakened the FBIs case for classifying Page as a foreign agent. The Justice Department has itself acknowledged that the final two FISA applications targeting Page therefore lacked adequate predication as a result. This failure stemmed in part from DOJs process for reviewing renewal applications, which highlights the new information added in each iteration. While in principle renewals applications are supposed to be reviewed in their totality, in practice this appears to have led to minimal scrutiny of claims and conclusions already accepted by the FISC. Why waste time on what has already been thoroughly vetted? As Klein puts it: The structure of renewal applications may influence the cognitive process agents and lawyers undertake in preparing them. That may encourage the drafters to rest on the facts in the original application, rather than reconsidering the probable cause assessment in light of new developments.

We can add to Kleins analysis that the tendency toward confirmation bias in FISA renewals is likely to be exacerbated by an important distinction between the evidentiary standards applicable to foreign intelligence surveillance, as compared with the so-called Title III wiretaps employed in ordinary criminal investigations.When a Title III wiretap is sought, the purpose of surveillance and the showing required before an order can issuewhat we might call the success condition and the threshold conditionare reasonably tightly aligned. Barring unusual edge cases, Title III wiretaps that achieve their purpose (obtaining evidence of a crime for use in a subsequent prosecution) simultaneously reinforce their own predicates and provide additional grounds for reauthorization (probable cause to believe that surveillance will yield evidence of a crime that has been, is being, or will be committed). A Title III order that meets its success condition, in other words, will by definition satisfy the threshold condition for its own reauthorization, assuming additional evidence is deemed necessary before commencing prosecution.

In the case of FISA, however, the success condition and the threshold condition are not so tightly connected. The pool of U.S. persons whose communications might reasonably be deemed to contain foreign intelligence information under one of the five definitions delineated in 50 U.S.C. 1801(e) is almost certainly substantially larger than than the pool of U.S. persons knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities at the behest of a foreign power. A communication in which an American is probed for information by members of a foreign clandestine service, for example, could very well provide information that relates to or is necessary to protect against clandestine intelligence activities by an intelligence service or network, or to the conduct of U.S. foreign affairs regardless of whether the American is a knowing agent or an unwitting asset. The Inspector Generals findings in the Page case suggest that, having once persuaded the FISC of a targets foreign agent status,the focus in renewals shifts to the question of productiveness: whether surveillance has generated, and continued surveillance is likely to generate, foreign intelligence information. But this is, of course, a different question from that of whether the initial assessment that the target is a foreign agent has been validated.

This difference may contribute to inadequate scrutiny of renewal applications by investigators and attorneys accustomed to the criminal investigative process. If a Title III wiretap is productiveyielding evidence of a crimethat productiveness inherently vindicates the initial showing that there was probable cause to believe such evidence would be obtained. Failure to adequately appreciate that the same tight nexus between threshold and success conditions need not exist in FISA surveillance may be one cause of insufficient attentiveness to new information undermining the agent of a foreign power determination.

While Kleins proposals are fine as far as they go, they represent relatively modest procedural tweaks that do not, in my view, get at the root cause of dysfunction in the FISA process: the fact thatFISA applications are not tested in an adversarial process, and FISA surveillance is classified. FISA interceptscan be used as evidence in courtsubject to the Classified Information Procedures Act, which seeks to balance defendants due process rights against national security interestsbut this is not their main purpose, and in practice it is vanishingly rare. The overwhelming majority of FISA targets never learn that they, or the people they communicate with, have been wiretapped. This eliminates a critical mechanism of accountability: The target, after all, is far better situated than any DOJ reviewer to identify falsehoods or missing context. The elaborate multilayered system of review FISA applications undergo is an imperfect attempt to compensate for the absence of this mechanismand indeed, it seems plausible that accuracy gains from requiring multiple reviewers are offset by the diffusion of responsibility this entails. If one reviewer misses a problem, many other eyes will have an opportunity to catch it, and if everyone misses it, then (excepting really egregious misconduct) its hard to fault anyone in particular.

The best remedy here may also be the most straightforward: End the presumption that FISA surveillance, at least in the case of U.S. person targets, will remain permanently covert.

Permanent secrecy has been baked into FISA since its inception, and the special exigencies of foreign intelligence collection surely justify a greater degree of secrecy than we countenance in criminal investigations, where targets typically must be notified within 90 days of the termination of surveillance. But even giving due weight to those considerations, a categorical rule of permanent secrecy in every FISA case seems impossible to justify.

Ordinarily, notice to the target of a search is constitutionally requiredan element of the Fourth Amendment reasonableness of a searcheven though it may be delayed whenadvance notice would frustrate the purpose of the search. In the seminal caseBerger v. New York, the Supreme Court invalidated a New York State wiretapping statute in part because it failed to adequately provide for notice:

Finally, the statutes procedure, necessarily because its success depends on secrecy, has no requirement for notice as do conventional warrants, nor does it overcome this defect by requiring some showing of special facts. On the contrary, it permits unconsented entry without any showing of exigent circumstances. Such a showing of exigency, in order to avoid notice, would appear more important in eavesdropping, with its inherent dangers, than that required when conventional procedures of search and seizure are utilized. Nor does the statute provide for a return on the warrant thereby leaving full discretion in the officer as to the use of seized conversations of innocent as well as guilty parties. In short, the statutes blanket grant of permission to eavesdrop is without adequate judicial supervision or protective procedures.

InUnited States v. Freitas, the Ninth Circuit noted that, followingBerger, the absence of any notice requirement in [a] warrant casts strong doubt on its constitutional adequacy. The warrant at issue in that case was found constitutionally defective in failing to provide explicitly for notice within a reasonable, but short, time subsequent to the surreptitious entry on the grounds that surreptitious searches and seizures of intangibles strike at the very heart of the interests protected by the Fourth Amendment.

There is ample reason to suppose that exigency would, in the intelligence context, often justify significantly longer delays than Title III permits. Here, after all, the government is concerned not only with tipping off an individual target, but with exposing to foreign adversaries the contours of intelligence collection efforts that may span years. FISA, however, does away with the notice requirement categorically, without any need for a particularized showing that notice of a wiretap would incur harms. And it does so even when, as in the Carter Page case, the governments initial assessment that a target is acting as a foreign agent cant be sustained.

The Page case, of course, provides us with at least one instance where it was evidently possible to publicly disclose not just the fact of surveillance, but substantial detail about its basis, without apparent injury to national security. In the rare cases where FISA evidence is used in a criminal prosecution, defendants similarly receive notice, subject to the constraints of the Classified Information Procedures Act. But if it is at least sometimes possible to provide notice without imperiling national security, FISAs categorical presumption of permanent secrecy seems impossible to justify. Even giving maximum deference to the special needs inherent to intelligence collection, it cannot be that a constitutional notice requirement is overcome simply becausethe government at one pointbelieved a target to be a foreign agent, regardless of whether that belief is borne out.

FISA should instead require a particularized showing of exigency to avoid notice at the termination of surveillance, at least in the case of U.S. person targets. Even if there are indeed compelling grounds for extended delays of notice in most such cases, eliminating the universal presumption creates at least the prospect of meaningful accountability for improper targeting of Americans.

One final feature of the FISA processa matter of longstanding practice rather than statutory structuredeserves reevaluation. The FISA Court is frequently defended against charges that it functions as a rubber stamp on the grounds that its high rate of approved applications does not capture the extended dialectical process that occurs between FISC staff and DOJ attorneys. Proposed applications are often modifiedor withdrawnin response to feedback from the court, rather than being submitted and rejected. The FISC, in other words, is more scrupulous and demanding than the official approval statistics imply.

This process, however, may itself have undesirable consequences. Like any court, the FISC relies on a body of precedent to guide its rulings. Uniquely, however, this body of precedent consists primarily of the FISCs own classified opinions interpreting the FISA statute and the requirements of the Fourth Amendment in the foreign intelligence context.

Normally, precedent functions to set boundaries ongovernment conduct byestablishing exemplars of both what is permissible and what is forbidden. Under this set of facts, a governmentsearch comportedwith therequirements of the Fourth Amendment; under that set of circumstances, it did not. Many of the cases as the heart of our Fourth Amendmentjurisprudence are, in essence, instances of a court telling the government no. (Typically, of course, these are the result of a challenge raised by the subject of a searcha challenge that the secrecy default denies most FISA targets the opportunity to raise.) These establish benchmarks to which future courts can refer in evaluating new cases: If past government conduct was held incompatible with the Fourth Amendment, a similar result should obtain when similar facts recur.

The informal FISA dialectic, howeverespecially in the absence of adversarial testing after the factbiases the paper trail, so that what survives as precedent is disproportionately a record of yesses. When the FISC approves an instance of electronic surveillance, that approval is preserved for the reference of later FISC judges. Yet when the court informally rejects a draft applicationbecause its scope is too broad, or its proposed minimization procedures inadequate, or its probable cause showing thina comparable benchmark may not be established. A new FISC judge confronting an application may have no easy way of knowing that substantially similar applications were in the past rejected at a preliminary stage, while approvals under similar facts remain etched in the record.

Given the natural variance in judicial attitudes to close casesthere will always be marginal fact patterns where some judges would say yes while others would say nothe FISA dialectic risks setting up a ratchet effect over time, even if we stipulate that the Courts procedures are well designed to prevent deliberate judge-shopping. A dozen FISC judges may informally say no, but it is the one who eventually says yes who furnishes the government with a citation for future use.

While this informal dialectic doubtless has many advantages, both for the FISC and the Justice Department, over time it is likely to have a cumulative distorting effect on the FISCs determinations. This is particularly troubling when we consider the FISCs evolving role, which has grown beyond the largely ministerial approval of specific targets, and now routinely includes the evaluation of programmatic surveillance. While it may be less convenient in the short term, it is likely improve the quality of FISC deliberation if the court gets in the habit of putting more of its nos on the record.

Such fundamental changes to the FISA process are, needless to say, more difficult to implement and more prone to meet resistance than Kleins more incrementalist proposals. But if the problems with the current FISA process are indeed structural, as they appear to me to be, then they will only be adequately addressed by structural reform.

Here is the original post:
Reforming the FISA Process: Tweak or Overhaul? - Just Security

DANBURY The YouTuber who has recorded his interactions with police and security guards at the Danbury Library and City Hall claims they tried to violate his first and fourth amendment rights.

But experts say the situation is more complicated.

Theres a lot more nuance than that, said Laszlo Pinter, the citys attorney.

Danbury police department has launched an internal investigation into its officers response captured in YouTuber SeanPaul Reyes video where he refused to stop recording at the Danbury Library, despite a library policy banning filming without permission.

A second video, where police are called when the YouTuber declines to give his name to a security guard at Danbury City Hall, is not part of the investigation, Chief Patrick Ridenhour said.

The five officers from the library incident, including a city sergeant who the YouTuber says he intends to sue, remain on duty, Ridenhour said.

Screenshots from a video from the YouTube channel Long Island Audit showing interactions with a security guard, police and other officials at Danbury City Hall on Thursday, June 10, 2021. Danbury police were called to City Hall on Thursday, June 10, 2021 after YouTuber SeanPaul Reyes refused to give his name to the security guard in order to enter the building. Reyes left after the town clerk was called down to the lobby so he could file his intent to sue a city sergeant.

Screenshots from a video from the YouTube channel Long Island Audit showing interactions with a security guard, police and other officials at Danbury City Hall on Thursday, June 10, 2021. Danbury police were called to City Hall on Thursday, June 10, 2021 after YouTuber SeanPaul Reyes refused to give his name to the security guard in order to enter the building. Reyes left after the town clerk was called down to the lobby so he could file his intent to sue a city sergeant.

Screenshots from a video from the YouTube channel Long Island Audit showing interactions with a security guard, police and other officials at Danbury City Hall on Thursday, June 10, 2021. Danbury police were called to City Hall on Thursday, June 10, 2021 after YouTuber SeanPaul Reyes refused to give his name to the security guard in order to enter the building. Reyes left after the town clerk was called down to the lobby so he could file his intent to sue a city sergeant.

Screenshots from a video from the YouTube channel Long Island Audit showing interactions with a security guard, police and other officials at Danbury City Hall on Thursday, June 10, 2021. Danbury police were called to City Hall on Thursday, June 10, 2021 after YouTuber SeanPaul Reyes refused to give his name to the security guard in order to enter the building. Reyes left after the town clerk was called down to the lobby so he could file his intent to sue a city sergeant.

Screenshots from a video from the YouTube channel Long Island Audit showing interactions with a security guard, police and other officials at Danbury City Hall on Thursday, June 10, 2021. Danbury police were called to City Hall on Thursday, June 10, 2021 after YouTuber SeanPaul Reyes refused to give his name to the security guard in order to enter the building. Reyes left after the town clerk was called down to the lobby so he could file his intent to sue a city sergeant.

It has not been necessary to put anyone one on leave, he said in an email.

Ridenhour declined to comment further, citing the ongoing investigation. Hearst Connecticut Media requested through the Freedom of Information Act the records of the officers involved in the library incident, as well as the body camera footage.

Both videos are edited.

I only see one side of the story, Mayor Joe Cavo said. Until I get all the facts, Im going to reserve my comment and see what happens with the rest of the information and how things proceed.

Danbury plans to keep its building policies in place, although officials are reviewing the incidents.

First Amendment law is very complicated, Cavo said. Fourth Amendment law is very complicated. Were trying to sort out how that relates to our responsibilities here as a public agency, and were working out those details now within inside counsel and outside counsel.

Reyes is part of a social media movement known as First Amendment Audits, where people film in public buildings, such as libraries or municipal centers, in an attempt to showcase how officials abide by the U.S. Constitution and the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech and the press.

Allied Universal, the security company that the Danbury guards in the videos work for, trains its staff on how to respond to these auditors, the company spokeswoman said.

Guards take a specific training module on these audits when they join the company. The module includes appropriate practices for how to handle these situations, spokeswoman Vanessa Showalter said.

Guards are informed if auditors are in their area and get additional tips if so, she said.

The company has seen auditors the most in California, where Allied Universal, is based, she said.

Their whole goal is to provoke on-site security professionals in order to illicit a negative response, she said. The reason why they do this is so they can get a lot of likes on their Facebook and their social sites in order to get money. That is their whole goal.

Reyes told Hearst Connecticut Media on Friday that he aims to exercise his rights and educate police through his videos. He said he aims to start an outreach program in Connecticut where activists like himself could shed light on rights violations and is thinking about starting a YouTube channel to teach kids about these issues.

He said he has not taken any criminal justice courses and learned what he knows through YouTube and other online sources.

Im a big believer of knowing your rights, he said.

His channel, Long Island Audit, has about 24,200 subscribers as of Monday evening, up from around 22,800 subscribers on Friday. His video at Danbury Library has 66,000 views, while the City Hall video has 49,000 views.

Heck, if it does nothing other than make government employees aware that we the people have the right to observe that which is observable by the naked eye, it cant be a bad thing from where we sit, said Dan Barrett, legal director with the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut.

Cavo said hed rather see a collaborative approach.

I see what this guys doing and he has the right to do that, he said. For me, I dont know. I think in this world we need to figure out how to work together instead of instigate.

Some police officers know Constitutional law better than others, Barrett said.

Its never been clear to me that the training, if any, that they get on the free speech and the right to memorialize has any effect, he said.

Individuals have the right to film in and from public places, Barrett said.

Anywhere that you are allowed to be as a member of the public and anything you can see with your own eyes, its fair game, he said.

But the rules get trickier in places that are more sensitive, he said. Libraries can be places where people research or conduct private activities, such as research health related information, he said.

So, its unclear whether the librarys policy banning filming or photography would stand in court.

It depends a little bit on whats restricted where and what the librarys interests are, Barrett said.

The library policy states that filming or photography is not allowed inside the building without permission from the library director. Patrons may not take photos or videos of other library users without their permission.

Motivations dont matter when it comes to the First Amendment, Barrett said.

It doesnt particularly matter from the First Amendment standpoint, Barrett said. Thats all fair game. What matters is whether the library has a good enough reason and an appropriately tailored policy.

In a second video uploaded Sunday, Reyes goes to City Hall to file his intent to sue a Danbury police sergeant but refuses to give his name to the security guard, as required for visitors under COVID-19 precautions.

I shouldnt have to surrender my Fourth Amendment right to enter a public building, Reyes says.

Dont go there, the security guard says.

Dont go there, Reyes says. This is the United States of America.

I am the guard here, the security officer says. I dont make the rules. I enforce the rules. This is what they want me to do. They want me to take your name, give you a card and you go upstairs.

Collecting names to contact trace for COVID-19 in public buildings would likely not violate peoples protection from unreasonable search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment, Barrett said.

In the time of COVID mercifully waning though it is in Connecticut it may be the case that collecting names is O.K., providing there is sufficient restriction on the use of those names, Barrett said.

Its fine if Danbury throws out the names after 14 days, but not if the city uses them to track if those people are paying their taxes, for example, he said.

Pinter argued the YouTubers claim about the Fourth Amendment violation is misplaced. Asking for someones name to enter a public building for COVID or security reasons is reasonable, he said.

Asking for identification is not a seizure if its reasonable, Pinter said. If its reasonable, its not a search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment.

See the rest here:
A YouTuber tried to 'audit' how well Danbury follows Constitutional rights. The answer is complicated. - Danbury News Times

An American man is suing the city of Springfield, Illinois, and six of its police officers for opening an urn containing his daughter's ashes and allegedly "desecrating" it during a traffic stop.

In his lawsuit, Dartavius Barnes claims the officers violated his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

Mr Barnes also claims the officers stopped his car initially without reasonable suspicion or probable cause that he had committed a crime, according to the lawsuit filed by his attorney, James C Pullos.

The lawsuit further accuses the police department of violating the Springfield man's Fourth Amendment rights of unlawful search and seizure of his vehicle without probable cause, a valid search warrant, or consent, and claims the officers acted intentionally and maliciously.

In its response to the lawsuit, the city denied Mr Barnes' claims and maintained the city and its officers were protected by "qualified immunity as their conduct was justified by an objectively reasonable belief that it was lawful."

"Unfortunately, I am not permitted to expand upon the contents of our answer at this time," Ms Fancher said.

The Springfield Police Department also declined to comment when contacted by CNN.

Mr Barnes has declined to speak with CNN about this incident.

Body camera footage shows traffic stop and search

The traffic stop occurred on April 6, 2020, when Mr Barnes was pulled over by a Springfield police officer for speeding and running a stop sign, according to the police incident report.

The officer who stopped Mr Barnes' car stated in his incident report that he heard through department radio that Mr Barnes was also a potential suspect from a nearby report of shots fired.

Mr Barnes' vehicle was shot one time in the passenger side rear fender, according to a police incident report.

"It is unknown if the blue Chrysler driven by (Dartavius Barnes) was a target of the shooter or was hit by the round," the incident report states.

"I had Dartavius exit the car and secured him in handcuffs," and sat him in the backseat of the officer's patrol car, according to the incident report.

Body camera footage of the incident was recently published and obtained from the police department by CNN.

The footage showed that Mr Barnes sat inside in a police vehicle for nearly 30 minutes after he was stopped.

Five other officers who were also on patrol came onto the scene and searched the vehicle.

"No problem if I search?" an officer asks Mr Barnes in the video.

"Yeah, go ahead," Mr Barnes states, as police search his car.

In the bodycam footage, an officer is seen holding a sealed urn which he found during his search. The incident report states a brass object was discovered which was shaped like a rifle round.

"I have seen similar items like this before utilised to contain narcotics," the officer wrote in the report.

"Then I checked for cocaine, but it looks like it's probably molly," the officer says in the bodycam video to one of his colleagues.

In the video, police tell Mr Barnes they found a substance in his car that tested positive for drugs, specifically ecstasy or meth.

The substance was instead the ashes of his deceased two-year-old daughter, Ta'Naja Barnes, which were kept in a sealed urn.

The brass object shaped like a "rifle round" or a bullet is a commonly used cremation urn necklace worn by individuals.

"No, no, no, bro. That's my daughter. What are y'all doing bro ... give me that bro, that's my daughter," Mr Barnes says in the video when officers showed him the urn.

Police decided not to re-test the ashes and gave the urn back to Mr Barnes' father, who had arrived on the scene in a separate car.

"Common sense, though, man," Mr Barnes' father is heard saying the video, regarding the contents of the urn.

The lawsuit claims the officers "desecrated" his daughter's ashes when they spilled some of them during the search.

Ms Davis and her boyfriend, Anthony Myers, were sentenced to prison for their roles in her death.

Mr Myers is serving 30 years in prison after he was found guilty of first-degree murder, according to WICS and court documents.

Ms Davis is serving 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to first-degree murder, according to WICS and court documents.

A trial on Mr Barnes' lawsuit against the city is scheduled for August 2022, according to court documents.

According to the lawsuit, Mr Barnes is asking for "compensatory and punitive damages in an amount to be determined at trial" along with attorney's fees, costs, and litigation expenses and any other "relief as the court may deem just or equitable."

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Father suing US police department for opening an urn containing the ashes of his daughter - 9News

President Joe Biden supports a ban on assault weapons like the one that has been in place in California since 1989. On June 4, however, Roger Benitez, United States judge for the Southern District of California, ruled that California's ban is unconstitutional.

The judge is probably correct.

Benitez's ruling is a peculiar piece of work for a document that aspires to serious legal analysis. The ruling's tone and the judge's personal high regard for assault weapons are obvious in its first sentence: "Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment."

Elsewhere Benitez's prose smacks of the oppression that pro-gun advocates claim to endure at the hands of anti-gun zealots: "Under this relaxed test a state could enter a person's home without a warrant and seize him or his guns in violation of the Fourth Amendment prohibition of searches and seizures without a warrant." This is paranoia worthy of an NRA lobbyist.

Benitez devotes a couple of pages to breathless descriptions of six cases in which homeowners used AR-15s to thwart home invasions, but he doesn't acknowledge that this is anecdotal evidence, which should be of questionable standing in legal analysis.

The judge also doesn't note that, according to FBI homicide data, for every "justifiable" gun homicide in 2012, there were 34 criminal homicides, 78 suicides and two accidental gun deaths.

And how common are home invasions? Judge Benitez says, "it surely happens a lot."

All we really need to know about the sketchy nature of this ruling is this unhelpful sentence from page 47: "More people have died from the COVID-19 vaccine than mass shootings in California." That can't be true. In fact, it's not, suggesting that we should view the entire document with some skepticism.

Our American infatuation with firearms is regrettable. The daily carnage is tragic. And the emergence of the AR-15 as the essential icon of a disgruntled minority who are angry, fearful, aggrieved and hostile to government is ominous.

Nevertheless, despite his bias, Benitez probably got it right about the unconstitutionality of an assault weapons ban, and his ruling is a good predictor of the result if the issue ever reaches our conservative Supreme Court.

The right to have a weapon for self-protection precedes the Constitution, a right so "natural" that the founders didn't bother to secure it by language any stronger than the slender reed of the Second Amendment.

The founders could not have imagined the killing efficiency of a modern assault rifle, any more than they could have imagined television, a Black president or a female vice president. For them, the "right to bear arms" implied muzzle-loading muskets. Still, if the modern hypothetical home invader is much better armed than in colonial times, the modern hypothetical homeowner has a right to be better armed, as well.

But even a constitutional right can be limited. The courts have held that citizens cannot own machine guns or bazookas. Some of the carnage might be limited by more rigorous background checks, mandatory training and demonstrated proficiency.

Even Benitez's ruling includes testimony (p. 30, p. 47) suggesting that the real culprit in mass shootings is large-capacity magazines. Reducing legal magazine size might help even the odds in the Great American Shoot-Out.

But in the meantime, our challenge is to find a way to live in a society drowning in guns, even as a hundred of us die every day by gunfire.

Tribune Content Agency

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Crisp: Learning to live with assault weapons - Chattanooga Times Free Press