This isn't an either/or scenario.

There's a reasonable distance that a law enforcement officer (or paramedic, or firefighter) need to be in control of, in order to focus on their job. Maybe it's 1ft, maybe it's 50ft: the courts should decide.

There's also a reasonable public expectation to be able to record police officers doing their job, for subsequent review.

Hopefully we can all agree that someone loudly "recording" shoulder to shoulder with police officer disrupts their ability to resolve situations? Just as we can agree that not having any recording of a police officer's potentially illegal actions is antithetical to ensuring justice?

There are disingenuous protesters who abuse recording excuses to disrupt law enforcement.

There are corrupt cops who abuse recording limitations to disrupt transparency.

Both of these things are wrong.

> This isn't an either/or scenario.

Right, it's already illegal to interfere with police.

There are a lot of laws passed to clarify or elaborate on existing laws. Unless there's common law that already specifies this exact scenario, this just specifies a specific case for judges, citizens and first responders.

I get the impression this law exists more for political reasons than for practical application --not that it won't be applied. Floridian voters seem to like the police but hate taxes. Granting powers to the police to help them harass "undesirables" without any added cost is the kind of law they get excited for.

If I'm on the ground and an officer is yelling at me, I do not want other people even within that officer's bubble of space.

It's unreasonably escalatory in situations that instead need more calm.

>If I'm on the ground and an officer is yelling at me, I do not want other people even within that officer's bubble of space.

If you're in that position, particularly for something as simple as he took something you said the wrong way, the cameras might keep the officer from going overboard too.

Oh, always-on cameras are a 100% prerequisite solution. The presumption needs to be that if a body camera is ever off, the worst thing happened while it was.

Along with ensuring that hardware reliability and UX clearly communicates camera functioning to officers. (I'm not young enough to still assume widely-deployed tech, procured by the government, in real world scenarios is always functional)

You don’t want more than one person to be close enough to notice if you’re still breathing?

> we can all agree that someone loudly "recording" shoulder to shoulder with police officer disrupts their ability to resolve situations

Sure. We can also agree that throwing rotting sea slugs at anyone eating a hamburger is disagreeable. But absent evidence of it (a) happening and (b) going un(der)punished, any legislation to ban it is performative.

Performative legislation isn't bad per se. Ideally, it would have no effect. But given almost any increase in legal surface area brings rise to unintended consequences, the result is a net negative.

> are disingenuous protesters who abuse recording excuses to disrupt law enforcement

Again, do you have examples of people recording police disrupting law enforcement where those recording weren't punished (sufficiently)?

> Both of these things are wrong

If one is occuring more frequently, and moreover going more-frequently unpunished, then tipping the scale further in that direction is counterproductive.

If police abuse is running rampant while nobody can find unpunished instances of disruptive recording of the police, then these rules are more likely to further the abuse than facilitate legitimate law enforcement. (To say nothing of the wasted political capital, given the myriad of problems Florida has to deal with.)