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Adam Steinbaugh - Should cops raid your home for filming them?
•The Lars Larson Show
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8:51
Adam Steinbaugh, Senior Attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, joins Lars to discuss a Tennessee man’s lawsuit after eight armed officers raided his home following his filming of alleged police misconduct.
Hey, welcome back to the Lars Larson show. So think about this. Eight armed police officers stormed a man's home before dawn. His crime was filming a cop or videoing a cop breaking the law. Is that justice or is it police payback? I thought we'd talk about it with Adam Steinbach, who's a senior attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, otherwise known as FIRE, and I very much appreciate what FIRE does. And I haven't I can't remember, Adam, uh, the last time I disagreed with FIRE about an issue of one kind or another. I don't think I'm going to disagree this time either. So welcome back to the program.
SPEAKER_01
Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_00
Would you mind telling my audience about this man in Tennessee who was doing something that what i he thought was legal, and in fact, in hindsight, it it is legal to do what he did. And and I don't understand why the police responded the way they did. But describe the circumstances, please.
SPEAKER_01
Well, about four years ago, Joshua Gibbons was driving late one night and he sees a Kingsport Police SUV pass him without lights or sirens, and it's going well above the speed limit. And he pulls out his phone, he films this car as it's speeding, uh, he notes what speed it's going, uh, and he follows it. And he arrives at a fast food drive-thru, gets out of his own car, and goes up to the window of the police SUV, and essentially says, Why do you think you're above the law? Why do you think that you're allowed to speed and the rest of us aren't? Uh and the officer refuses to identify himself. Uh he's polite, but he's you know not interested in giving Joshua any uh information. Uh so Joshua has some unkind words for the officer. Uh he uh uses one of George Carlin's uh famous uh prohibited words, uh, and he walks away. Uh the officer didn't treat it as a crime, uh he didn't do anything about it, and that was you know, frankly, the right thing to do. The officer took it on the chin. Uh he was a big boy, uh, and he didn't he didn't get out and arrest Joshua for anything there.
SPEAKER_00
Nor uh even at this point, was there anything he could have arrested him for at that point? Joshua committed no crime, right?
SPEAKER_01
No, there was no crime. Uh the department changed its mind uh when Joshua posted this video uh on his YouTube page, and he also posted a second video in which a member of the department had flipped him off. Uh and what started all of this rolling was that a member of the public saw this video of uh the police officer flipping Joshua off and wrote to the department to complain about it. So the department gets this complaint, uh, and somewhere in the department they say, Hey, wait a minute, we've got a problem here. This guy is embarrassing us, and looking through his videos to see if they can find something to go after him for. And lo and behold, they find this video showing their officer speeding. And they look really closely at this video and they say, Hey, wait a minute, Joshua's also speeding if you look closely at his speedometer. Yep. So they go out and get a warrant, and uh, this is within minutes of seeing this video. Uh, they get a warrant for his arrest and they arrest him for speeding uh and for using his cell phone while driving uh and disorderly conduct, and they haul him off to jail. Uh and for the next four years he'd gone through two different trials. Uh a judge found him guilty of disorderly conduct uh because the judge didn't like the way he was talking to the officer, uh, and then a jury found him uh uh guilty of disorderly conduct.
SPEAKER_00
Hold on a second, Adam. Had this judge was this judge familiar with the First Amendment? Because the First Amendment was written to protect rude, crude, intemperate speech, as long as it doesn't there are ways speech can cross the line, and I think we all know about examples of that, but simply being rude or crude is not one of them, is it?
SPEAKER_01
And no, it's not. And the Supreme Court has taken the opposite approach of saying, you know, it's not that you need to be nicer to police officers, it's that police officers should be trained to be uh resilient. Uh they should be able to uh deal with people who are going to criticize them. Because if you criticize someone, if you criticize a police officer and get arrested for it, that's a police state.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and in fact, what what makes me wonder about this is at some level this had to go to a supervisor who was told, we're gonna do a raid on this guy's house. We're gonna roust him out of his house, we're gonna arrest him for something that they would ordinarily write a ticket for, speeding. Um, and the supervisor had to say yes, right? Was there no cooler head somewhere at that police department?
SPEAKER_01
And not only that, but under Tennessee law, uh the statutes there actually prohibit police from arresting someone for speeding. They are only allowed to write a ticket for that. So they went out and got an arrest warrant for speeding, uh, an unlawful use of a cell phone, and then disorderly conduct. Disorderly conduct is the one thing that you could actually arrest someone for in Tennessee, but the Criminal Court of Appeals, when they finally heard this case, you know, almost four years later, they looked at it and said, there's just no evidence to support the state's theory here. This was not disorderly conduct.
SPEAKER_00
And in this, just to be clear, what they were charging was the disorderly conduct was simply, you know, the intemperate words or the profane words that uh that that Gibbons used to the officer?
SPEAKER_01
That's that's more or less it. The state tried to, you know, as the case went along, tried to come up with this theory that uh if you read the statute, it says disorderly conduct can also be creating an offensive condition. Uh and what they were saying was, well, the offensive condition was that he was standing in a drive-thru uh area, uh, so he could have blocked other cars. And then they tried to say, uh, or actually the disorderly conduct was that he was making noise, and that prohibited or made it difficult for other people to carry on their lawful business. Well, the officer was just at a drive-thru trying to order a hamburger, and he wasn't even at the window where you ordered a hamburger. So he wasn't impeding anything.
SPEAKER_00
All right, so how is all this thing rolled out? What's the end resolution of this?
SPEAKER_01
Well, we filed a federal lawsuit, uh, and we are now allowed to proceed with that now that the criminal charges have been vacated. Uh and you know, Joshua wants to send a message to this police department uh and we're here to help him.
SPEAKER_00
Has Kingsport at all tried to say, look, we can settle this whole thing out with a big fat apology and a maya culpa, right? Have they done any of that?
SPEAKER_01
I uh can't tell you the number of times that a police department has actually said uh we will apologize for this. They they don't tend to apologize.
SPEAKER_00
I get that. Although although I I guess if you're if you're a resident of Kingsport, Tennessee, you might be inclined to say, before you go out and spend a few hundred thousand dollars of our time dragging this thing through the courts, why don't we do the sensible thing? Admit we did something wrong. That is Adam Steinbach. Adam is a senior attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Adam, thanks very much. I appreciate the time. By the way, did you know your car can be a spy? Now here's a true story that proves that point. A guy's car insurance jumped more than 20 percent. No accidents, no tickets. So he started digging to find out who had reported him. Turns out it was his own car. Every hard time he braked, every fast merge, every late-night taco run, his automaker logged all of that, sold it to a data broker, the broker sold it to his insurance company. He asked for the file. Hundreds of pages. General Motors just agreed to pay $12.75 million to the state of California over the very same thing. The lesson: data brokers aren't just selling their address, they're selling their habits to anybody who wants to buy them. That's why I've used Incogni. INCO GNI. It's the online service that forces those data brokers and the people search sites to delete your information. Incogni has scrubbed me from more than 900 sites so far, and they let me know every single day how many more they're signing off on. Go to incogni.com slash LARS for 60 percent off. That's INCOGNI. Incogni.com slash LARS. Don't let them take you for a ride. Your car should take you those places.
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