Federal Court Accepts Arizona AG’s Admission Of Defeat, Blocks ‘No Recording Cops Within 8 Feet’ Law

One of a long series of laws written to limit police officer accountability has been not only rejected by a federal judge, but also the cops it was supposed to “protect” and Arizona’s top prosecutor.

Last March, the Arizona legislature decided cops simply can’t do their job with the public looking over their shoulders. So, they crafted a law that would make it illegal to record law enforcement officers from less than eight feet away — a distance that would presumably be guesstimated on the spot by any officer who felt annoyed their actions were becoming part of the permanent public record.

Then-governor Doug Doucey decided the idiots in the state legislature were right and signed the unconstitutional legislature forwarded to him by state reps. This was greeted immediately by the inevitable: a constitutional challenge in federal court.

That has not gone well for the Arizona government. Not only were cops less that fully supportive of the bullshit law, but the state Attorney General — after being hit with an injunction — filed a motion in court notifying the judge the AG’s office would not attempt to enforce the unconstitutional law. In addition, the motion stated the government would cough up $69,000 in legal fees to reimburse the litigants who had filed the challenge.

This chain of events has led to the obvious end point: a permanent injunction issued by the court handling the case. Here’s the Associated Press with the details (but, for some reason, none of the relevant court documents):

A federal judge has ruled that an Arizona law limiting how close people can get to recording law enforcement is unconstitutional, citing infringement against a clearly established right to film police doing their jobs.

The ruling Friday from U.S. District Judge John J. Tuchi permanently blocks enforcement of the law that he suspended last year.

Here’s the ruling [PDF] that was issued last Friday. Most of it simply accepts the state AG’s admission of defeat. It only runs three pages, but it still manages to make it clear this law is a Bad Law and should never have been passed by the Arizona legislature, much less signed by the governor.

To wit:

A.R.S. § 13-3732 is declared unconstitutional as a violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, because:

a. there is a clearly established right to record law enforcement officers engaged in the exercise of their official duties in public places, see e.g., Askins v. Dep’t of Homeland Sec., 899 F.3d 1035, 1044 (9th Cir. 2018); b. the statute imposes a content-based restriction that is subject to strict scrutiny as it “singles out specific subject matter”—recordings of law enforcement activities—“for differential treatment,” Reed v. Town of Gilbert, 576 U.S. 155, 169 (2015); and c. the statute does not survive strict scrutiny because it is not narrowly tailored or necessary to prevent interference with police officers given other Arizona laws in effect.

A.R.S. § 13-3732 is declared unconstitutional as a violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, because:

a. the statute is not a reasonable “time place and manner” restriction, see Hill v. Colorado, 530 U.S. 703, 713 (2000); and b. the statute cannot withstand intermediate scrutiny because the law prohibits or chills a substantial amount of First Amendment protected activity and is unnecessary to prevent interference with police officers given other Arizona laws in effect.

So obviously bad even a career prosecutor couldn’t be bothered to prosecute it, much less drag out this litigation any longer. The law is permanently blocked, which means it’s pretty much erased from the state law books. A law you can’t enforce isn’t actually a law. It’s just a bunch of constitutional violations pretending to be a law. And that simply does not work anywhere the First Amendment is valid — an area that includes Arizona despite its occasional assertions that guaranteed rights can be readily (and stupidly) abridged.