A French court last week ordered internet service providers in the country to block all access to a \u201cCopwatch\u201d site after vigorous complaints by the government and police organizations against the site and its users. An unusually harsh imposition of internet censorship even by the more restrictive standards of France, the move highlights the real-world effect that differing free speech norms can have on broader questions of criminal law and society\u2019s relationship with its law enforcement agencies.<\/p>\n
The French organization, Copwatch Nord Paris I.D.F., represents a relatively recent international outgrowth of a grassroots movement that began in the United States more than two decades ago. The first group was founded in Berkeley, California, in 1990, and shares with other loosely affiliated groups across the country the broad goal of curbing police excess by recording and publicizing instances of brutality or constitutional violations. Portland Copwatch\u2019s activism after the police shooting of Kendra James<\/a> in 2003 helped lead to the identification of the officer involved\u2014and brought with it accusations that the organization had recklessly exposed the officer to danger of reprisals. More recently, a Copwatch group in Phoenix made an effort to discover evidence of racially discriminatory traffic stops in the wake of Arizona\u2019s S.B. 1070 immigration bill, provoking accusations<\/a> by Maricopa County\u2019s Sheriff Joe Arpaio that Copwatch was engaged in manipulative selective editing. There, as in several cases throughout the country, copwatch activism has helped produce at least one concrete result\u2014the spread of on-board cameras with which police produce their own video records, both to increase transparency and to provide ammunition to rebut outside accusations of misconduct.<\/p>\n In the United States, a consensus has emerged\u00a0that observers are within their rights to make video recordings of the police as they make arrests and otherwise go about their business. As the recent case of Glik v. Cunniffe<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>demonstrates, individuals\u2019 \u201cclearly established\u201d First Amendment rights outweigh all but the most pressing government interests\u2014and the police interest in avoiding public\u00a0 scrutiny is not only not pressing, but hardly legitimate at all. Though some controversy remains in U.S. jurisdictions over non-consensual audio recordings, the rights of Copwatch organizations to record and publicize videos of police misconduct have been settled.<\/p>\n The French discussion, of course, takes place in the absence of a First Amendment or any similar conception of speech as a central, preeminent right. Copwatch Nord Paris IDF engages in many of the same activities as its sister American organizations, with the stated goal of \u201cmonitoring those who oppress us.\u201d In addition to posting videos of police on duty, however, the French site also includes identifying information and pictures from Facebook and other publicly available social networking sites\u2014including photos of police drinking and otherwise misbehaving when off-duty. Claude Gueant, the French Interior Minister, lodged an impassioned complaint against the site<\/a>, alleging in particular that the collection of identifying information of officers into a comprehensive database \u201charms the personnel of the interior ministry and jeopardizes their and their families\u2019 safety.\u201d\u00a0At least one officer testified that he had received a threatening mail message because of the site, but evidence of actual harm to Parisian police was lacking. Nonetheless, the French court agreed with the government and police union, and it ordered service providers to block the Copwatch site entirely because they asserted that selective blocking would be too difficult.<\/p>\n At first glance, the rationale for a decision so overtly favoring police privacy interests over transparency and citizens\u2019 speech rights seems deficient\u2014and this has certainly been the reaction of French free speech advocates. The spokesman of a French internet-rights organization described<\/a> the ruling as evidence of \u201can obvious will by the French government to control and censor citizens\u2019 new online public sphere.\u201d\u00a0In terms of its practical effects, too, the ruling seems characteristic of a troubling trend towards uninhibited police authority. A 2009 Amnesty<\/a> report noted that \u201cAllegations of beatings, racial abuse, excessive force and even unlawful killings by French police are rarely investigated effectively and those responsible are seldom brought to justice.\u201d \u00a0In 2010, a French teenager was sentenced to a three-month prison term for the offense of \u201cpublic outrage\u201d for insulting the national gendarmerie <\/em>on his Facebook page after he was pulled over in a traffic stop.<\/p>\n Seen primarily through the familiar American lens as a question of police overreach, a decision blocking a \u201cCopwatch\u201d effort seems merely a further step towards law enforcement impunity. The decision becomes somewhat more comprehensible, however, when viewed in light of the characteristically continental European emphasis on privacy and \u201cdignity\u201d rights. The differing treatment of citizens\u2019 rights vis a vis <\/em>the police mirrors the transatlantic distinction between liberty and dignity as ordering principles. Whereas American \u201cliberty\u201d embodies a hostility towards the organs of state power\u2014and American rights are conceptualized primarily as safeguards against central government abuse\u2014the primary menace to a European citizens\u2019 dignity interest is not always the government, but the intrusiveness of \u201csociety.\u201d As Yale Professor James Whitman noted<\/a>, \u201cThe core continental privacy rights are rights to one\u2019s image, name, and reputation<\/em>\u2026.They are all rights to control your public image\u2014rights to guarantee that people see you the way you want to be seen.\u201d\u00a0It is not hard to see that behind the French police union\u2019s rage over the supposed security threats posed by copwatch lies anxiety about the indignity and shame of such widespread exposure of misconduct.<\/p>\n The centrality of dignity to the European conception of individual rights has produced a number of distinctions with American traditions, many of which have their admirers among critics of the American tendencies towards First Amendment \u201cabsolutism.\u201d Among these are the prevalence of civility norms, restrictions on hate speech, and significantly stronger protections against libel and defamation. Strong arguments can be made that the marginal gain in liberty of expression created by allowing free rein to Holocaust deniers or scandalmongers is more than offset by the corresponding abasement of societal discourse brought about by such a wide-open environment. The Copwatch decision, though, is a vivid reminder that a society\u2019s concern for dignity rights, especially the dignity rights of authority figures, can have liberty consequences that are far less trivial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A French court last week ordered internet service providers in the country to block all access to a \u201cCopwatch\u201d site 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