Know Your Rights: Copwatching 101

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
Mr. Chief Justice, please support. It's an old joke, but when a man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they're going to have the last word.
She spoke not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity. She said, I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.

**Leah** (0:45)
Hello and welcome back to Strict Scrutiny, your podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. This episode is a bonus episode we are offering as part of a limited series we are calling Know Your Rights. It's kind of a what can the Constitution do for you guide. As we talked about when we were discussing Melissa's book, The US. Constitution, it's more important than ever for the people to understand the Constitution and to be able to claim it for themselves, rather than handing it over to the weirdos at one first street. A lot of our extra summer content is going to be in that spirit, and that includes this Know Your Rights segment, which we're hoping will be an informative overview to help our listeners stay safe and challenge unlawful conduct in an aggressive enforcement climate that calls for protest and public action.
This particular episode is devoted to knowing your rights about cop watching, the ability to observe and record law enforcement officers. Here to join me in explaining rights regarding cop watching is a person who literally wrote the article on the topic, Jocelyn Simonson. Welcome to the show, Jocelyn.

**Jocelyn Simonson** (1:43)
Thank you for having me.

**Leah** (1:44)
Thanks so much for joining. Jocelyn is the Herman Badio Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, where she teaches and writes on criminal procedure. She is also the author of Radical Acts of Justice, How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Incarceration. Okay. So Jocelyn, let's start with the basics.
What is cop watching and why does it matter right now?

**Jocelyn Simonson** (2:04)
Cop watching is a general term for watching law enforcement perform their duties in public. It could be with a cell phone recording them. It could not be. It could just be observing them. It could be alone or it could be with a group. But it's the deliberate watching of people who claim to represent the public and keep us safe. Because it's deliberately watching someone who has power, watching people who are used to having all the power, it carries with it an emphasis that can feel like a challenge and a power shift. I am watching you because you claim to be promoting safety. I may be recording you to try to make sure that you do the right thing in the moment. If not, make sure that others can see what you're doing too.
So cop watching has always been important and it predates cell phones.
But as many people are likely aware, there have been moments where cop watching has taken on increased significance. One of them was in 2014 and 2015 around the Lives of Black Lives Matter movement, which is when I began writing about it. But in the last year and a half, cop watching has taken on renewed significance under the Trump administration, especially with watching federal law enforcement come into cities, especially ICE agents, but all kinds of federal law enforcement. Sometimes now it's called ICE watching, but it's the same thing. It's coming together to record law enforcement officers in your community.

**Leah** (3:37)
We'll talk about some of those variations in the course of our discussion. But when you wrote your article Cop Watching in 2016, it was salient at the time and it is additionally salient now. So just to give our listeners a kind of reminder, the New York Times ran a story documenting its analysis of hundreds of cases brought by the Trump administration against protesters and immigrants, often related to allegations that people supposedly assaulted immigration officers.
And in the 213 cases the Times analyzed where the government lost, they found, quote, officers charged more than two dozen people who were filming or following agents. And there was actually no allegation of physical contact with agents. So your article that appeared in the California Law Review, we should say, remains one of the authoritative texts on the topic. And you explored the particular phenomenon of organized cop watching. Can you talk to us a bit about organized cop watching? Where does it come from? And what distinguishes it from just casually pulling out your phone when you see police activity?

**Jocelyn Simonson** (4:36)
Yes, I think of organized cop watching as emerging around the 1960s in urban areas in the United States, when the Black Panthers famously patrolled city streets with guns and cameras, and other civil rights organizations conducted unarmed patrols in groups to watch police officers to try to keep communities safe and try to tell people what was going on. And when I researched my cop watching article in 2014, 2015, I researched the topic because I was seeing an expansion at the time of the tactic with the rise of Black Lives Matter. And I wanted to interview activists and understand why they were doing it, what they were experiencing, and why it felt so powerful. Because to me, it did feel powerful when I saw it happening.