Radley Balko of Reason Magazine interviewed Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, for a recent article about police who arrest people for filming them. The FOP bills itself as “the world’s largest organization of sworn law enforcement officers, with more than 325,000 members in more than 2,100 lodges” and “the voice of those who dedicate their lives to protecting and serving our communities.”

Here’s what Pasco had to say:

“There’s no chain of custody with these videos,” Pasco says. “How do you know the video hasn’t been edited? How do we know what’s in the video hasn’t been taken out of context? With dashboard cameras or police security video, the evidence is in the hands of law enforcement the entire time, so it’s admissible under the rules of evidence. That’s not the case with these cell phone videos.”

…

“You have 960,000 police officers in this country, and millions of contacts between those officers and citizens. I’ll bet you can’t name 10 incidents where a citizen video has shown a police officer to have lied on a police report,” Pasco says. “Letting people record police officers is an extreme and intrusive response to a problem that’s so rare it might as well not exist. It would be like saying we should do away with DNA evidence because there’s a one in a billion chance that it could be wrong. At some point, we have to put some faith and trust in our authority figures.”

Pasco’s comments are totally illogical.

First, Pasco is incredibly naive if he seriously believes that there are fewer than ten incidents where videos have contradicted police reports. If he wants to find ten examples, he should peruse Carlos Miller’s Photography is Not a Crime blog. He’ll find plenty.

But even if fewer than ten such incidents occurred, Pasco’s argument still wouldn’t make sense. Part of the reason people film police encounters is to deter police from lying. Police are much less likely to lie if they know that a judge or jury might end up seeing a video that disproves the lie. Instead of thinking about all the cases where videos have contradicted police reports, Pasco should consider all the cases where lies weren’t caught because there was no video.

Next, Pasco’s claim that we need to “put some faith and trust in our authority figures” is equally ridiculous. Police are not from another planet. They are human beings just like you and me. Like all other human beings, they are capable of lying, stealing, killing, etc. Simply treating everything they say as fact and making no attempt to independently verify it doesn’t make sense especially when you consider that they are “authorities” who, due to their position in the legal system, have tremendous amounts of power over others.

Would Pasco tell Jack McKenna to simply “put some faith and trust” in the “authority figures” who brutally beat him for no reason, charged him with crimes he didn’t commit, and mysteriously lost (yeah, right) surveillance video of the incident due to a “technical error”? Or should he put his faith in the ability of himself, his friends, family members, and good Samaritans to document police encounters with their personal video cameras? I would recommend the latter since McKenna wasn’t exonerated until an iPhone video of the beating was released by another student.

Pasco’s claim that allowing people to film police is like throwing away DNA evidence because of “a one in a billion chance that it could be wrong” doesn’t make any sense, period. I’m honestly having a difficult time understanding how anyone could make such a nonsensical analogy and treat it as a compelling argument. What would be comparable to ruling out DNA evidence because it might be misleading is ruling out video evidence because it might be “edited” or “taken out of content”–something that Pasco apparently believes courts should do.

In Pasco’s Dark Age mind, self-serving testimony proffered by police officers (ahem–”our authority figures”) shines a brighter light on the truth than video evidence. In Pasco’s ideal society, courts accept the police equivalent of papal infallibility as their dogma and non-police are banned from even trying to independently document their encounters with police.

As Balko points out, none of Pasco’s arguments even begin to explain why people should be arrested, imprisoned for years, and labeled felons for filming police. Even if every cop is 100% honest and professional and even if videos could be considered too misleading to be admissible as evidence in court, there’s still no reason to treat filming police as a crime.