Well-known cop watcher James Freeman was unfazed by the mainstream media’s recent coverage of a phenomenon he himself has participated in for the better part of five years.
A recent Washington Post story highlighted how Freeman and other “cop watchers” had altered the behavior of police officers with simple yet powerful tools: omnipresent cell phone cameras that turn encounters with cops into provocative YouTube videos. But for him, by the time the article was published, it was already outdated.
Freeman is one of hundreds who have reinvented the process of cop watching since the Black Panther Party started filming police in the 1960s. He thinks the battle between citizen journalists and law enforcement has evolved.
Partly, that battle has shifted from the streets to the courts—a change in venue that Freeman says has been a natural evolution, and one that he knows all too well since his cop-watching tactics have often ended up being adjudicated by a judge, not police on the street.
“You start to realize the judiciary is truly a branch of government accountable only to itself,” Freeman told Police Accountability Report. “It’s frustrating because they can endlessly drag you through the system.”
But cop watching itself has also changed, a practice that is part of a broader movement to redefine what it means for regular people to actively push back against an array of institutions, not just policing, that govern their lives. This ongoing struggle to hold power accountable may have started on the streets, but it has since moved on.
Freeman is one of hundreds who have reinvented the process of cop watching since the Black Panther Party started filming police in the 1960s. He thinks the battle between citizen journalists and law enforcement has evolved.
This idea crystallized for Freeman when he turned his attention to his local courthouse in rural New Mexico. The move led to one of Freeman’s most daunting skirmishes and, recently, one of his most implausible victories.
Officials had banned Freeman from the courthouse in New Mexico via an administrative order, arguing he was disruptive. But Freeman countered with a federal lawsuit alleging the order violated his right to due process and the First-Amendment-guaranteed freedom of the press. The defendants, a group of court officers, did not respond to the complaint, which led to a default judgment in Freeman’s favor. Now, his lawyers are in settlement talks.
“We’ll see what happens, but at least I can go back and report,” he said. “I’m going to keep fighting.”
Freeman is not the only cop watcher who has found the legal system a more fertile ground to press the argument that citizen journalists are an integral—and Constitutionally protected—part of holding police and government power accountable.
The Texas cop watcher Phillip Turner, known as The Battousai, who was featured in the Washington Post article, made case law during his battle with Corrigan, Texas, police. The YouTuber, who has over 251,000 subscribers, was arrested for the simple act of filming the police.
According to the lawsuit, Turner was cuffed and placed in the back of the police cruiser with the windows rolled up so “they could leave him there to sweat for a while.” The arrest led to a federal civil rights lawsuit establishing the right to film police officers, their vehicles, and stations in the notably conservative federal Fifth District.
But, as The Battousai has since learned, the process of turning a court ruling into a reality on the street is more complex. The decision, now codified in case law as Turner v. Driver, established the right to film police and allowed municipalities to set widely varying restrictions.
But that court order has led to another battle over the interpretation of the ruling, which The Battousai says the town has used to bend the appellate court decision by setting overly restrictive guidelines.
“None of the appellate courts ruled on distance. It is up to the town to come up with a reasonable time, place, and manner to record,” he told PAR.
“They decided to come up with a law to criminalize filming police officers,” he said, explaining that the ruling has led to another legal battle. “I’m fighting it.”
From curbside to the courts
The shift to the courtroom from the sidewalk reflects an uncomfortable reality that often goes hand in hand with the process of constantly watching cops: sometimes, the act itself can lead to an arrest. That fact was particularly true for one of cop watching’s most controversial practitioners, Denver activist Eric Brandt.
Brandt says he has been arrested almost 200 times, a result that some attribute to his confrontational and often colorful style when interacting with police, but others say it stems from law enforcement’s intolerance of pushback. Either way, Brandt and his unorthodox antics left their mark—not just on the sidewalk, but in the courtroom.
He was known for bicycling around Denver with a giant homemade middle finger inscribed with “F-ck Cops,” and for attending hearings dressed in unconventional attire, including wearing a spaghetti strainer on his head, which Brandt said he did as part of his religious observance as a “Pastafarian.”
Brandt is currently serving a 12-year sentence after pleading guilty to three felony counts of Retaliating against a Judge. The penalty has been decried as overly harsh by his supporters, and Brandt is now appealing it on the grounds that the judge’s rationale for the sentence expressed bias against him.
Last November, Denver City Council agreed to pay Brandt $65,000 to settle a lawsuit over his 2018 arrest for shouting “No Justice? No Peace! Fuck the Denver police!” on the 16th Street Mall.
But Brandt was, and still is, a prolific filer of lawsuits, writing his own briefs and representing himself in roughly a dozen civil rights and First Amendment cases.
Notably, he sued the Englewood police department after they arrested him for a tattoo that displayed a middle finger on his forearm emblazoned with his signature “F-ck Cops” motto.
Brandt’s pro se suit led to a $30,000 settlement, First Amendment training for the Englewood police department, and the early institution of body-worn cameras.
“I call this my $30,000 tattoo,” Brandt told PAR in an interview in 2021.
Last November, Denver City Council agreed to pay Brandt $65,000 to settle a lawsuit over his 2018 arrest for shouting “No Justice? No Peace! Fuck the Denver police!” on the 16th Street Mall.
He was also part of a groundbreaking lawsuit that established the right to film police in the federal 10th Circuit. Brandt and another cop watcher, Abade Izzaray (known as Liberty Freak), filed the suit, which began with a straightforward cop watch of a DUI stop in Lakewood, Colorado, in 2020.
The duo’s encounter was peaceful until another officer who was not involved in the stop arrived on the scene: Officer Yehia. Yehia purposely moved in front of their cameras, flashed a light into their faces, and then drove his car in Brandt’s direction while repeatedly using his car horn.
Abade and Brandt filed a suit pro se, arguing that the officer’s actions interfered with their right to record. But after a federal district court ruled the officer could not be held accountable due to qualified immunity, several advocacy groups joined the suit with the hope it would be a test case to establish the right to film police.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the US Department of Justice were among the organizations that filed amicus briefs on their behalf. Eventually, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the officer should have known the right to record was established and remanded the case back to the district court for a trial.
The plaintiffs recently reached a settlement for $35,000. But, as Liberty Freak notes, he has effectively stopped actively cop watching while remaining entangled in various legal actions stemming from his previous work on the streets. For him, that is the next and most important battleground: creating case law that will make the process of cop watching less fraught.
“It’s so much more difficult than people think,” he told PAR. “I’ve been so lucky to have Eric Brandt, who has connected me to a lot of attorneys who have helped us,”
But he added that trying to steer a case through the courts without a law license is perhaps even more precarious than turning a camera on cops.
“Doing it on your own, I’ve discovered, there’s not a whole lot of help if you’re working pro se,” he said. “It’s like you have to be part of a special clan.’
For a group of Texas YouTubers, a recent set of indictments has led to the more troubling prospect that municipalities could criminalize the act of cop watching—an existential struggle that could lead to years in jail and a veritable shutdown for others who could fall under the same legal category.
Can Cop Watching Be Criminalized?
Not all cop watchers, however, are battling in civil courts over the right to film.
For a group of Texas YouTubers, a recent set of indictments has led to the more troubling prospect that municipalities could criminalize the act of cop watching—an existential struggle that could lead to years in jail and a veritable shutdown for others who could fall under the same legal category.
Prosecutors in Polk County, Texas, have charged four Livingston, Texas, cop watchers, including HBO Matt and Corners News, under the state’s “Organized Crime” statute.
The charges result from what HBO Matt says was a routine cop watch. The indictment used a novel legal theory arguing that, since cop watchers create videos that are monetized on YouTube, their act of filming is a criminal conspiracy.
“They know that they don’t have a real criminal case against us, but they are dragging us through the courts… The process is the punishment,” he said.
But Texas is not alone in using the law to push back against—and, perhaps, criminalize—cop watching. It is a strategy taking root in several statehouses such as Arizona, Oklahoma, and Indiana.
In Arizona, multiple media organizations, including the ACLU and the Associated Press, joined forces to fight a law limiting how close people can get to police while recording them—a law that was declared unconstitutional in July by US District Judge John J. Tuchi.
In Indiana, state legislators also passed HEA 1186, a bill to limit cop watchers from filming within 25 feet of a police officer. The bill is being contested after a cop watcher named Donald Nicodemus, also known as Freedom2Film, was charged with violating the law after cops continued to order him to back up in 25-foot increments multiple times while he was documenting a police investigation into a shooting.
The lawsuit contends the law creates an onerous and subjective 25-foot buffer between the videographer and officers performing their duties. The ACLU asserts that HEA 1186’s wording permits officers to enforce this perimeter solely based on the act of recording, without evidence of interference with an officer’s duties.
The streets still matter
Of course, many who continue to cop watch still find work on the street to be a necessary and essential part of the process..
Tom Zebra, who has been filming cops with a VHS recorder in his trunk since the early aughts, and his partner Laura Shark, were recently reminded of this truism when they arrived on the scene of a car stop by the Los Angeles County Sheriff in June.
The LA sheriffs, notorious for their penchant for racially profiling motorists, had detained a driver for having tinted windows. But the encounter soon escalated when police accused the driver of being under the influence of marijuana. Officers proceeded to confiscate the phone of his passenger, who had been filming.
“They know that they don’t have a real criminal case against us, but they are dragging us through the courts… The process is the punishment.”
“HBO MATT,” COP WATCHER
Fortunately, Tom, Laura, and Jodie Kat Media arrived shortly after the police had handcuffed the driver. Their documentation of what happened next provided compelling first-hand reporting on an agency that the ACLU had accused of spending billions of dollars indiscriminately pulling over motorists of color.
As the trio continued to film, police escalated the stop by accusing the driver of smoking marijuana, citing his recent purchase at a nearby dispensary. However, he maintained his innocence, noting that the purchase was still in its container. The driver was arrested, and his passenger was abandoned on the side of the road; her phone was confiscated, and her house keys and wallet were impounded.
Still, Tom and Laura continued to film and provide a visual record of the anatomy of a questionable car stop, capturing on a granular level what the ACLU had accused the department of doing writ large.
Fortunately, the passenger could turn to the cop watchers for consolation, a ride, and $85 to retrieve her property.
A movement that is about more than cops
Perhaps the shift from the curb to courts is a simple recognition of what cop watching truly is about: a movement that goes beyond policing.
What these chaotic camera people lack in Twitter credibility or legacy media stature, they compensate for with anarchistic creativity. They invent new ways to report without internalizing or prescribing any particular presentation ethos other than defiance. In a sense, they have taken back the free press from the elites who profess to own its digital domains by putting their imagination first. The one commonality this disparate group shares is the belief they have the right to be heard.
It is imprecise, messy, and often provocative. But it’s also a grassroots movement about much more than cops—perhaps that’s the real story the mainstream media is missing.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
