Top Chicago Lawyer Robert J. Callahan on Police Cameras and Miranda Rights
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Robert: The police are so busy, or for whatever reason, they justify it and say, “We don’t really need to read this guy his right, or this woman her rights”. It could compromise their case too, a lot of times someone might stop them and say, “Wait a minute, did you say I have a right to council? Ok, then I want council there, I want an attorney here”. So they’ve gotten in the habit, and it’s almost like an unwritten rule or an unwritten protocol with the police to not actually read suspects their rights. To answer your question, to go back to that, the most important thing to do is to remain… .
V.O.: Alright. So, you know, I’m shocked in this day and age of video cameras everywhere, on people’s cell phones, I’m sure some police departments have them mounted right in their cars and everything else, that the police wouldn’t do a simple thing like read you your rights.
Robert: That’s another thing, it was funny how people think there is going to be these recordings here, and all the… They’re always asking for the video tapes like, “Isn’t it required that the police have video cameras in their cars now?” Because the Chicago Police Department, and even local government fought it tooth and nail when they tried to make a requirement that there be cameras in all the cars. And what they argued is it’s cost-prohibitive; we can’t afford to put cameras in every single Chicago police car. We can’t afford to monitor the video footage that we’re going to obtain when we have a camera in every car. There’s so many arrests, the volume of arrests is so high. But I think the primary reason behind them fighting tooth and nail against cameras was that they didn’t really want people to see what goes on in your typical felony arrest in Chicago, or any typical arrest. I mean, Chicago is a tough place. There are some harden criminals here. There are some dangerous criminals here. And I think the police are given kind of wide latitude for their own safety and for the public safety in dealing with those criminals. So, to answer your question, again Don there is hardly any cameras in any of the Chicago police cars. There’s a few token cameras here and there but overwhelming majority of the time we’re not going to have any video footage either in the police car, in the police station, or at the scene of an arrest.