Editorial: Time to allow recordings of police officers at work

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Updated: February 17, 2012 8:09AM

If someone pushes a button to record what you say, it seems only fair you should be permitted to do the same.

But that’s not how it works in Illinois, which has one of the toughest eavesdropping laws in the nation. Even if you’re being audio-recorded by police, for example, you could be charged with a felony for making a precisely similar recording of your own.

Something that illogical can easily entrap people who honestly believe their actions are reasonable.

State Rep. Elaine Nekritz (D-Northbrook) has introduced legislation that would permit people to make audio recordings of police officers in public. The bill also would allow the recording of phone conversations with a business if the business has already announced it might record the call itself. The Legislature should enact this eminently sensible bill into law.

Police officers have a tough job, and the thought of a passel of citizens with microphones turning an ordinary arrest into something resembling a huge flashbulb-popping press conference might well annoy them. They might also worry that troublemakers will sneakily edit recordings to give a false impression of how police acted. But that hasn’t been a problem in other states where eavesdropping laws are more relaxed.

This is an area where the law has to catch up with technology. Recording devices are everywhere, even in such places as Syria, where citizens have captured images of their struggle for democracy and beamed them to the world.

Here in America, we increasingly are told we have no expectation of privacy when we are in public and that our every move may legally be recorded by surveillance cameras.

In such an environment, police officers should not expect that their actions while on duty are private.

“I don’t know why a public official on public business on public property has any expectation of privacy,” Nekritz said.

The issue of recording police came to a head when a Chicago woman, Tiawanda Moore, made a recording with her BlackBerry because she thought two police internal affairs investigations were trying to talk her into dropping a sexual harassment complaint against a patrol officer. That would have seemed to fit an exemption under the current law, which permits a citizen to audio-record police officers if the citizen believes the officers are breaking the law. But Moore was charged with a felony.

In the end, she was acquitted, and last week she filed a lawsuit. But ask yourself this. If attached to your right to turn on a recording device is the very real possibility you could be sent to prison for up to 15 years, how much of a right does that feel like? Most people would be hesitant to assert their rights in that scenario. The Moore case illuminated the flaw in the current law.

Nekritz said another motivation for introducing the bill is that the Illinois eavesdropping law already has been declared unconstitutional by a Crawford County judge and has been challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union in federal court. Enacting her bill would resolve those legal issues, she said.

Why drag out fight this in court? By passing Nekritz’s bill, the Legislature can bring this issue to its proper resolution.