| u-Bob |
06-16-2011 03:08 AM |
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when chicago police answered a domestic disturbance call at the home of tiawanda moore and her boyfriend in july 2010, the officers separated the couple to question them individually. Moore was interviewed privately in her bedroom. According to moore, the officer who questioned her then came on to her, groped her breast and slipped her his home phone number.
Robert johnson, moore's attorney, says that when moore and her boyfriend attempted to report the incident to internal affairs officials at the chicago police department, the couple wasn't greeted warmly. "they discouraged her from filing a report," johnson says. "they gave her the runaround, scared her, and tried to intimidate her from reporting this officer -- from making sure he couldn't go on to do this to other women."
ten months later, chicago pd is still investigating the incident. moore, on the other hand, was arrested the very same afternoon.
her crime? At some point in her conversations with internal affairs investigators, moore grew frustrated with their attempts to intimidate her. So she began to surreptitiously record the interactions on her blackberry. In illinois, it is illegal to record people without their consent, even (and as it turns out, especially) on-duty police officers.
"this is someone who is already scared from being harassed by an officer in uniform," said johnson. "if the police won't even take her complaint, how else is a victim of police abuse supposed to protect herself?"
moore's case has inspired outrage from anti-domestic abuse groups. "we just had two chicago police officers indicted for sexual assault, there have been several other cases of misconduct against women," says melissa spatz of the chicago task force on violence against girls & young women. "and now you have moore, who was trying to report this guy, and she gets arrested. the message here is that victims of unwanted sexual advances by police officers have no recourse -- that the police can act with impunity."
if the chicago cops recently indicted for sexual assault are convicted, they'll face four to 15 years in prison. That's the same sentence tiawanda moore is facing for trying to document her frustrations while reporting her own alleged sexual assault: Recording an on-duty police officer in illinois is a class 1 felony, the same class of crimes as rape.
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illinois' problem with privacy
last summer the u.s. Media took note of several stories about citizens arrested for photographing or recording on-duty police officers. National coverage of these incidents has since died down, but the arrests haven't stopped.
Some of these arrests have come under decades-old wiretapping laws that never anticipated the use of cellphones equipped with cameras and audio recording applications. Others have come under vaguer catch-all charges like refusing to obey a lawful order, disorderly conduct, or interfering with a police officer. In both cases, the charges rarely stick, and in most cases, it's the cops themselves who are violating the law.
The media have largely done a poor job reporting on what the law actually is in these states. technically, so long as a person isn't physically interfering with an on-duty police officer, it's legal to record the officer in every state but massachusetts and illinois. arrests still happen in other states, but there's little legal justification for them, and the charges are usually dropped, or never filed at all.
But illinois is the one state where the law clearly forbids citizens from recording of on-duty cops. And so it seems likely that if the supreme court or a federal appeals court does eventually decide if pointing a camera at a cop is protected by the first amendment (so far, they haven't), the case will come from illinois. (courts in massachusetts have generally held that secretly recording police is illegal, but recording them openly isn't.)
illinois' wiretapping law wasn't always this bad. Originally, the statute included a provision found in most other state wiretapping laws stating that, in order for someone to be prosecuted for recording a conversation, the offended party must have had a reasonable expectation that the conversation was private.
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