Boston pays $170k to settle cell phone recording lawsuit

By Timothy B. Lee | arstechnica.com

The City of Boston has agreed to pay Simon Glik $170,000 in damages and legal fees to settle a civil rights lawsuit. Glik was arrested in 2007 on Boston Common for using his cell phone to record the arrest of another man. Police then arrested Glik, too, and charged him under the strict Massachusetts wiretapping statute. They eventually dropped the charges, but with the help of the Massachusetts ACLU, Glik filed a civil lawsuit against the city for false arrest.

Last year, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit unanimously ruled that Glik had a "clearly established" First Amendment right to record the actions of public officials on a public sidewalk. Boston finally admitted it had made a mistake earlier this year, and Boston taxpayers will now be paying for the screw-up.

"The law had been clear for years that openly recording a video is not a crime," Glik said in a statement. "It's sad that it takes so much for police to learn the laws they were supposed to know in the first place. I hope Boston police officers will never again arrest someone for openly recording their public actions."

Glik claims that officers in Boston's Internal Affairs Division made fun of him when he filed his original complaint with the police department; he says they suggested he'd be better off filing a civil lawsuit instead. They probably aren't laughing today.

The Massachusetts ACLU says that the City of Boston has changed its practices since Glik filed his lawsuit. The city "developed a training video based on facts similar to the Glik case, instructing police officers not to arrest people who openly record what they are doing in public."

An Massachusetts ACLU spokesman tells Ars that Glik himself will receive $50,000 of the money; the rest will go to cover the costs of his legal case.

We've also sought a comment from the City of Boston and will update our story if they respond.