Illinois Cop Claims It's "Now Illegal to Record" Cops After Caught Sleeping in Car

by Carlos Miller
PINAC
Jan. 21, 2015

An Illinois cop told a man it was “now illegal to record a police officer in public” after the man claimed he had caught him sleeping in his car on Friday.

It is not illegal to record cops in Illinois, as we explained here, but it used to be under the state’s Draconian Eavesdropping Bill until the courts struck down that law as unconstitutional after a lengthy legal battle between the ACLU and the Cook County State Attorney last year.

The decision forced the state legislature to draft a new bill, which was signed into law last month by departing Governor Pat Quinn.

The law is still one of the strictest in the nation, forbidding citizens to surreptitiously record cops in public. Only Massachusetts makes its illegal to record cops or anybody else for that matter in public surreptitiously. And yes, as PINAC’s  conservative readers like to point out, these are both traditionally democratic states.

Most all-party consent eavesdropping or wiretapping laws (terms that are used interchangeably depending on state), which make it illegal to record another person without their consent, have an expectation of privacy provision that makes it legal to record people in public, even surreptitiously.

In other words, if you are in public in an area where it is possible that a stranger can overhear the conversation, then it’s not illegal to surreptitiously record another person as long as you are part of that conversation.

However, ever since the new bill was introduced last month, numerous news sites have been reporting that it is still illegal to record cops in public, which is not only inaccurate, it allows police to lie to citizens that it is illegal when it’s not.

That’s what took place in this video out of Carbondale, a city in Southern Illinois, when a man said he spotted a local cop sleeping in his car for three hours in a church parking lot. After bypassing the Carbondale cop several times, Matt Fedora approached him with a camera recording, but the cop apparently woke up because he rolled down the window.



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