People who say they have faced violence for filming police interactions are condemning a law in Arizona that will restrict recording police officers from within 8 feet of police activity.
Without cellphone footage, victims said, it will be harder for residents to hold police accountable and seek justice in cases of police misconduct.
Mariah Hereford, 30, said police officers in Hemet, California, allegedly knocked her phone and her mother’s phone out of their hands and attacked them as they filmed authorities searching her fiancé’s car last year.
According to Hereford’s lawsuit against the city, an officer slammed her to the ground and hooked his fingers inside her jaw, “as if she were a fish, and yanked her upward from the ground,” choking her and making her lose consciousness.
“As I was being attacked, I felt like I was going to be a George Floyd,” Hereford, a Black mother of four kids in Riverside County, California, told NBC News. “I thought I was going to die that night just from recording.”