First Amendment protects right to livestream police officers, court rules
Rachel Schilke
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that livestreaming police officers is protected under the First Amendment.
The court heard the case Dijon Sharpe v. Winterville Police Department on Thursday, looking at whether a passenger in a vehicle detained by North Carolina police is allowed to livestream the encounter despite the officer saying it was against the law.
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A three-judge panel deliberated for an hour about how to resolve a dispute between the right to record police in public and restrictions set by officers for their safety in investigations. The court decided that the policy was restricting the passenger’s protected speech.
Many rulings in recent years have affirmed the First Amendment rights of bystanders to record police in public.
“We agree,” the appeals court said of prior rulings. “Recording police encounters creates information that contributes to discussion about governmental affairs. So too does livestreaming disseminate that information, often creating its own record.”
“We thus hold that livestreaming a police traffic stop is speech protected by the First Amendment,” it ruled.
Recordings taken from bystanders have resulted in the severe scrutiny of police and calls for criminal justice reform, most recently when bystanders recorded a Minneapolis officer fatally kneeling on George Floyd’s neck.
The North Carolina case arose from a traffic stop in 2018 when Dijon Sharpe began recording and livestreaming the stop. Sharpe is a black man who said he was a victim of police abuse just months prior to the traffic stop, per court records.
Officers Myers Helms and William Ellis told Sharpe that he could record but not livestream the traffic stop.
“We ain’t gonna do Facebook Live because that’s an officer safety issue,” Helms said, according to court records. He attempted to grab Sharpe’s phone, pulling on his seat belt and shirt in the process.
“Facebook Live … we’re not gonna have, OK, because that lets everybody y’all follow on Facebook [know] that we’re out here,” Ellis said. “So in the future, if you’re on Facebook Live, your phone is gonna be taken from you.”
A district court last year dismissed the case against the officers, saying that the policy does not “hinder [Sharpe’s] ability to disseminate [his] message.”
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Andrew Tutt, a lawyer for Sharpe, argued before the appeals court judges that police had no reason to end the live broadcast.
“They just said it was something they could ban because they felt like banning it,” Tutt said.