A printable one-page Guide to Recording Law Enforcement

You may be aware that cops have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public, and that you have a constitutional right to record what they do. Cellphone video proved that police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd's neck for nearly 10 minutes, and the right to record it is why the footage helped convict him of his murder. But police and the authorities don't like any of that sort of thing, and will do whatever the can to limit recording them or make it risky or troublesome for the public. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's new Guide to Recording Law Enforcement covers the basics in a printable one-page handout.

Courts have been clear that behavior that obstructs or interferes with effective law enforcement or the protection of public safety is not protected. Officers can't order you to move because you are recording, but they may order you to move for public safety reasons even if you are recording.

If the law enforcement officer is off-duty or is in a private space that you don't also have a right to be in, your right to record the officer may be limited. For example, a Los Angeles jury in 2026 found two women guilty of felony stalking after they followed an ICE agent to his home and livestreamed the pursuit.

And the all important one: "Be alert and mindful of the possibility that officers may illegally retaliate against you in a number of ways, including arrest, destruction of your device, and bodily harm." More likely than that, though, is an officer taking the device and trying to delete the footage; the EFF has other guides for making this harder for them to do.

Sadly, the ACLU's "Mobile Justice" app (a basic video recorder that baked timestamps and geolocation into footage and immediately uploaded it to the ACLU) was discontinued last year.

To ensure compliance with a growing number of consumer privacy laws and the ACLU's own privacy policies and to minimize risk with surveillance technologies currently used by law enforcement, the national office has made the decision not to renew our contract with Quadrant 2, the vendor behind Mobile Justice, and shut down the app on February 28, 2025.

Live streaming seems the obvious contemporary method; just make sure you've set your account to save the stream and that it can't simply be deleted from the handset. A local app could automatically push to cloud storage (e.g. with Shortcuts on iOS or MacroDroid on Android), but if the phone were grabbed while recording it might never upload in the first place.