There are people going around filming in public places who call themselves "First Amendment Auditors." They annoy people and are rude, provoking them. They claim to be providing a public service by educating people about the right to film in public places. This is unlikely to be true, but something similar is true. They are educating people in how to deal with narcissists.
There are at least two separate things happening in the interactions, and conflating them to the confusion of the people they have taken by surprise is how they get attention. First, they are largely right about the law. The right to observe or even film from a public area is largely protected. They are broadly right on the law.
And we want them to be. In a pinch we want to be able to expose police misbehavior, or bad service from government officials.
It is the second piece, where they are breaking the social contract but not the law that provokes people. Civil liberties attorneys will tell you that often the only people willing to push an issue forward are pretty obnoxious and difficult to work with. (Some of those attorneys are as well.) That usually doesn't impact the legal issue at hand. I am painting it in black-and-white pictures for clarity. In the actual situations sometimes the auditors do overstep and break the law. They intentionally seek out areas where people don't expect they have the right to film but actually do, such as entrances and lobbies of police stations and public buildings. Even the police and other government officials can get this wrong. The auditors are intentionally pushing the limits.
They are also intentionally being rude - interrupting, making general accusations, being insulting, intruding into gray areas. They have plausible deniability that they are "just" exercising their constitutional rights.* Yet imagine if no cameras were involved. Imagine they were just standing on the sidewalk in front of a business and staring into it. Then the shop-owner or policeman would have greater clarity what is up. The person is "behaving suspiciously," and questioning should proceed differently. But the camera triggers them into thinking that this must be illegal somehow and should be stopped immediately. It doesn't. You have time. Relax.
If someone is behaving suspiciously, they should expect to be addressed in sharper tones. That is where we get into the social contract of what we expect from other people. Societies function because people recognise what is within norms and needn't be worried about, but devote more attention when something is awry. If we had to investigate every action we encountered, no one would have time to buy groceries or or teach a class. Suspicious behavior calls for us to waste time that might be better spent because we want to bring help or prevent damage when things "just don't look right over there." The auditors get off on the attention you have to pay them.
When I started at the psych hospital, the idea was to meet force with force quickly when someone was threatening. Over time, better methods prevailed. One of the first things is to remove their audience as much as possible. This would seem impossible if they are filming for TikTok and their audience is remote, but you can take away their audience by being boring on camera. Brilliant replies to them only deter them for a moment. What you want is to be invisible.
*Whenever someone says they are "just" asking a question or "only" looking around you can bet they are actually doing much more. But they usually construct the situation in such a way that they can make it sound, butter-wouldn't-melt-in-their-mouths, as if the "merely" is defensible. It's a tactic. Don't get sucked in to arguing about tone, because even when you are 100% right you'll have a hard time proving it.
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