First Amendment

First Amendment aside, the NYPD still regularly arrests (and in some cases, taunts) bystanders who film officers and do not interfere with police actions. One officer even lied to make his arrest of a New York Times photographer legitimate. Now civil rights attorney Norman Siegel has filed a lawsuit in federal court that would stop city employees from seeking reprisals against those who would record them in public. "The NYPD maintains a policy, practice and custom in which officers interfere with the rights of individuals who, without interfering with police activity, are recording to attempting to record officers performing their officials duties in public," the lawsuit states, citing eight instances in which the police wrongfully arrested New Yorkers for recording them. One of those New Yorkers, Debra Goodman, was taking a cellphone video of paramedics assisting a woman in a wheelchair on West 73rd Street and Broadway last year before a police officer intervened.