Watching the Watchers: Monitoring Police Performance as Public Servants
![handle is hein.journals/guild73 and id is 25 raw text is:
Karl T. Muth
& Nancy Jack
WATCHING THE WATCHERS:
MONITORING POLICE PERFORMANCE
AS PUBLIC SERVANTS
Introduction
If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, what is a video worth? Apparently,
quite a bit more.
The proliferation of cell phone cameras has raised a new debate: whether
people can record the activities and conduct of police in public areas. Several
cases are making their way through the courts in which police officers arrested
people for video recording police officers or for refusing to stop recording
when asked. Courts have struggled with the appropriate framework to analyze
the issue, with no clear consensus.'
However, the employment relationship is rarely, if ever, explored as a
remedy to this jurisprudential confusion. Here, we argue that if employers
may record their employees, then people, as employers of the police, likewise
should be able to record the police when in public.
History
The importance of such a right by the public should not be understated.
As recognized by our Supreme Court:
[E]xposure to public view both reduces the ability of an unscrupulous policeman
to use illegitimate means to elicit self-incriminating statements and diminishes
the [citizen]'s fear that, if he [or she] does not cooperate, he [or she] will be
subjected to abuse.2
Monitoring police activity is nothing new. From the earliest days of our
colonial history, monitoring police activity has been a concern. The Third
Amendment addresses, primarily, records kept in Massachusetts and else-
where, where colonists could register complaints against occupying British
officers (similar to today's military police forces), who were enjoying the
Karl T. Muth is a professor at Pritzker School of Law, Northwestern University.
In addition to teaching law, he also teaches Economics, Organizational Behavior,
Public Policy, and Statistics at Northwestern. This paper focuses on an issue raised
in a lecture Prof. Muth delivered in 2014 on competing methodologies and theories
of oversight for law enforcement officers (including cameraphones). Nancy Jack is a
judicial law clerk at the Illinois Supreme Court from 2013 to present. She was also a
law clerk at the Illinois Appellate Court from 2000-2013. The authors would like to
thank colleagues from a variety of law schools faculties for their input, suggestions,
and thoughts regarding earlier drafts.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/guild73&div=6&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Watching the Watchers: Monitoring Police Performance as Public Servants
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