Police misconduct changes everything in Reckless Ben case

本站添加: 2026-06-07

[00:00:00]A police department in Utah uploaded a folder to the internet. 48 GB of body camera footage, dash camera footage, the raw record of 4 days in March when officers stopped, searched, and arrested a YouTuber and his friends over a pile of LEGO. Uploaded and set to public.

[00:00:20]The folder was labeled in plain words, unredacted body and dash cam.

[00:00:26]Somebody saved it before it came down.

[00:00:29]It is now mirrored on the internet archive timestamped June 3rd, 2:20 in the afternoon Mountain Time.

[00:00:37]But the department that released it did not mean to.

[00:00:41]A few days later, it posted a statement saying these were files not intended for public release, that it had promptly removed them.

[00:00:51]Then, it deleted that statement, too.

[00:00:54]So, we have a police department that accidentally published its own unedited record, tried to pull it back, and could not. It tried to close a door that doesn't close. Keep that image, a door left open that can't be shut again because there are two doors in this story, and the second one is built to do the opposite.

[00:01:18]That footage is the subject of today's video, not because of how it got out, because of what's in it. And because the man at the center of all this told the world it got out a different way, a way that, if anyone believed him, would have handed the police a gift that they did not earn.

[00:01:41]One thing up front, so I don't keep repeating it. Nobody in this story has been convicted of anything, and the most explosive material I'm going to describe reaches us through one side's edit of it. Some of it is solid, some of it is a man syncing audio in his bedroom.

[00:01:57]Let me start with the correction because I got a piece of this wrong in an earlier video, and so did almost everyone else, including the person it helps most.

[00:02:09]When the unredacted footage surfaced, Reckless Ben, the YouTuber Benjamin Schneider, went on national television and said someone had hacked the American Fork Police Department. He said it in his video, too. A hack, a breach, someone broke in and let it all out.

[00:02:24]That is almost certainly not what happened.

[00:02:28]Here's what the record actually shows.

[00:02:30]The department itself put a public link out into the world, a media kit, the kind of thing a police department posts when it wants reporters to have the files. Inside that link sat a folder that should have been redacted and wasn't. People found it and downloaded it and copied it to the Internet Archive before the department noticed and took it down. Then the department posted that statement I mentioned, "Files not intended for public release," which is a confession in its own words that this was its own upload, not someone else's break-in.

[00:03:06]So, picture what Ben actually did, and then picture how he described it.

[00:03:10]Instead of just using the gift of the footage, he must also confess to a burglary. He chose to tell a burglary version on purpose about himself.

[00:03:21]So, why does hack versus oops matter?

[00:03:24]Let me give you three reasons because they climb in importance. The first is about the evidence itself. When a police department is the source of its own footage, the footage authenticates itself. It's a public record produced by the agency that made it. There's nothing more to argue about. But the moment you say, "A hacker did this," you invite a different conversation entirely, a conversation about whether the file was altered, whether the chain of custody is broken, whether what we're watching is what the camera actually saw.

[00:03:58]A hack manufactures doubt. An accidental release carries none.

[00:04:04]Ben, by reaching for the more dramatic word, talked himself into a weaker position.

[00:04:10]The second reason is about Ben's own exposure. There's a federal computer crime statute, the CFAA, and a Utah one that punish unauthorized access to computer systems. Downloading a file from a public link that a government agency posted itself is not unauthorized access, not even close.

[00:04:31]The Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit have both said in recent years that you cannot commit computer fraud by looking at something already sitting open on a public link, even if the person who posted it wishes they hadn't. So, as accidental release, Ben is a journalist who downloaded a public file.

[00:04:50]But, as hack, he's volunteered himself into a story about a crime. Same footage, wildly different legal posture.

[00:05:00]And he picked the worst one and said it on national television.

[00:05:04]The third reason is the one I'd underline. There's a line of First Amendment cases, the one people know is the Pentagon Papers, but the cleaner ones are Bartnicki and Florida Star, standing for the idea that when the press lawfully gets truthful information about a matter of public concern, the government generally cannot punish it for publishing, even if the information was leaked, even if someone upstream broke a rule to expose it. That protection is strongest when the publisher's own hands are clean. Ben's hands are clean here. He downloaded a public file. The hack story muddies the cleanest thing he has going.

[00:05:45]So, the correction is simple. The footage was not hacked. The police released it themselves and tried to take it back. That makes it more reliable, not less, and it makes the man relying on it safer, not more exposed, than the story he told about it.

[00:06:03]Now, why does an accidental release of the unredacted version matter so much?

[00:06:09]Because we already had the redacted version. The department put that out first on purpose with the audio cut in places, and it told us why. The chief said the redactions were made at the request of the county attorney to protect identifying information about the victim, the new store operator, Joshua Johnson.

[00:06:30]Hold that explanation in your hand for a second, because the unredacted footage is about to test it. If the redactions really were protecting a victim's name and address, then when we hear the cut out parts, that's what we should hear, names, addresses, identifying details.

[00:06:47]But that is not, as Ben has synced and presented it, what is in the redacted gaps.

[00:06:52]What's in the gaps, and I'm telling you this from his edit, his sync, which is not yet independently verified, is officers talking to each other. Officers discussing what they could charge him with. An officer reportedly saying he shut off Ben's phone recording.

[00:07:09]Talk of digital stalking and cyber bullying. Talk of felonies that never got filed.

[00:07:15]And the line that's traveled the furthest, an officer in substance saying that they were all wrong about all this, but they should arrest Ben anyway.

[00:07:25]That letting him go cannot be an option.

[00:07:28]None of that is a victim's home address.

[00:07:32]And that's the problem with the redaction explanation. A redaction made to protect a victim's identity should remove the victim's identity only.

[00:07:42]When the removed material turns out to be officers debating charges and admitting they switched off a camera, this stated reason for the redaction stops matching the redaction.

[00:07:53]I'm not going to tell you that proves a cover-up. A sloppy redaction and a deliberate one look identical from the outside and I can't see inside. But I can tell you that the explanation we were given does not fit the thing it was supposed to explain. And when an official explanation doesn't fit the facts, a careful person stops taking the explanation on faith.

[00:08:16]Here's why this matters beyond the bad look, because I can hear the objection.

[00:08:21]Lying about why you muted some audio is embarrassing, but embarrassing isn't illegal. If I lie about why I was late to work, I'm a bad employee, not a criminal.

[00:08:31]Fair.

[00:08:33]A bad redaction by itself is not automatically a civil rights violation.

[00:08:38]But here's the turn, and it comes from a Supreme Court case called Hope v.

[00:08:42]Pelzer.

[00:08:43]The hardest thing to prove in a civil rights case isn't that an officer did something wrong. It's that the officer knew it was wrong, that he understood he was crossing a constitutional line.

[00:08:56]Lawyers call it consciousness of liability and it's usually the missing piece.

[00:09:01]Now think about what a selective redaction is. If the department muted the exact moments where officers admitted they lacked justification or admitted they shut off a citizen's camera, then the choice of what to mute is itself evidence.

[00:09:18]It says somebody listened to that audio, recognized those specific seconds as dangerous, and reached for the mute button on those and not others.

[00:09:29]The redaction isn't the violation, the redaction is the fingerprint of the violation, the sign that someone knew exactly which moments would hurt.

[00:09:37]That's the difference between a clumsy mistake and a calculated one, and it's the kind of thing that turns a questionable arrest into a willful one.

[00:09:49]Let me lay the conduct out in order because the order is the argument. It begins with a traffic stop, March 8th.

[00:09:56]Ben's in the passenger seat, a friend is driving. The stated reason is failing to stop fully at a line.

[00:10:03]Ben says the dashcam shows a complete stop.

[00:10:07]Set that dispute aside for a moment because the law has a rule here that surprises people. Under a case called Ren, w h r e n, if there was a real traffic violation, it doesn't matter what the officer was actually thinking.

[00:10:21]A pretextual stop with a genuine violation underneath is still a lawful stop. So, the fight isn't about motive, it's about whether the car stopped.

[00:10:31]That's a video question, not a legal one.

[00:10:34]The next day, March 9th, is where the law got interesting. There's a second stop, and this time a drug dog. The officer cites glossy eyes. They run sobriety tests. The result is zero, nothing. And in the unredacted audio, an officer reportedly says about the stop that he was going to scare him a little bit and let him go.

[00:10:55]Let me teach you why a lawyer's ears perk up at that sentence. There's a Supreme Court case called Rodriguez. The rule is this: police can stop you for a traffic violation, but they cannot stretch that stop out, cannot hold you longer than the traffic business takes just to get a drug dog to the scene, unless they have an independent reason to suspect a drug crime.

[00:11:16]The stop has a natural length, and they can't just pad it.

[00:11:20]Now, put the officer's own words against that rule. I was going to scare him a little bit.

[00:11:26]If the stop got extended not because of real suspicion, but to rattle a guy they found annoying, that's the exact thing Rodriguez forbids. And the officer narrated the motive himself on a camera he didn't know would ever be heard.

[00:11:43]Then March 11th, a search warrant. A judge signs off on a search of Ben's Airbnb for, {quote} any stolen merchandise, specifically LEGO merchandise. The basis is that the homeowner reportedly overheard talk of possibly stolen LEGOs.

[00:11:58]They search, the return, the official inventory of what they took reads, no items seized.

[00:12:06]Nothing. Again, they found nothing.

[00:12:10]Now, an empty-handed search is not by itself illegal. Police are allowed to look and come up empty. That's how looking works. But two things sit next to that empty return and make it itch.

[00:12:22]The first is in the unredacted footage, an officer reportedly remarks that he personally knows the Airbnb host, finds it so funny to run into him again.

[00:12:34]The second is the warrant itself.

[00:12:36]There's a doctrine from a case called Franks that lets you go behind a warrant and challenge it if the officer who swore it out lied or left out something important.

[00:12:48]Now, careful here because the pieces have to line up. What we have on the footage is an officer at the search who knew the host. Whether that's the same officer who swore out the warrant, the affiant, I can't yet confirm and it matters which.

[00:13:03]If they're the same person, then an undisclosed relationship with the tipster is exactly the kind of omission a Franks challenge is built for. If they're different people, it's a smaller thing, an appearance problem, not a defect in the warrant. Either way, we searched for stolen LEGO, found nothing, and an officer on the scene turned out to know the tipster is a sentence that has earned a second look.

[00:13:25]And it's at that search on March 11th that they arrest him. Ben says an officer wrenched his arm and injured his shoulder. Hold on to that because it comes back, and so does a complication.

[00:13:38]To support the injury, Ben later showed an x-ray. It turned out to be a stock image, not his own. And he acknowledged he'd dislocated that shoulder skiing a few days earlier. And file that one away. We'll need it when we get to the lawsuit.

[00:13:56]On the footage, the officers talk about serious charges. Felony stalking, something they called digital stalking, cyberbullying. At one point in the unredacted audio, there's talk of usury, which in Utah is a felony, as a theory against Ben.

[00:14:12]And then, when the actual charges were filed, here's what Ben faced. Four misdemeanors, stalking but the misdemeanor kind, targeted residential picketing, disorderly conduct, criminal trespass. No felony. Not one.

[00:14:26]I want you to notice the gap between what the officers discussed on camera and what the prosecutor actually charged on paper, because that gap is doing real legal work. There's a case called Nieves that governs when you can sue police for arresting you in retaliation for your speech and protest. Picketing, filming the police, those are speech.

[00:14:47]The core of Nieves is that ordinarily, if there was probable cause to arrest you for something, your retaliation claim fails, even if the officer also disliked your message. Probable cause is a shield.

[00:14:59]But watch what the felony talk does to that shield. When officers float felony stalking and usury and digital cyberbullying, and a prosecutor declines all of it and files four ordinary misdemeanors instead, that sequence supports an inference. The inference is that the big charges were never really about probable cause. They were about leverage, about scaring a man the officers found, in their own words, "annoying." And on the misdemeanor that's hardest to pin down, stalking, which turns on whether a reasonable person would feel real fear, the probable cause shield is at its thinnest. That's the soft spot. That's where a retaliation claim, if Ben ever brings one, would push.

[00:15:42]So, with all of that on the table, here's the question the comments are already asking. Does Ben have a civil rights lawsuit against this police department? A Section 1983 case. That's the federal statute you use to sue government officials for violating your constitutional rights. My answer is this. He has real claims. Let me sort them by how strong the underlying wrong is, and then, because this is the part that matters, I'm going to show you that the strength of the wrong is not what decides whether he wins.

[00:16:12]Start with the one with the firmest ground under it, retaliation for filming. If an officer really did shut off Ben's recording because Ben was recording, and remember that's reportedly the officer's own admission in his own voice, that strikes at a right courts have taken seriously for years, the right to record the police in public doing their jobs.

[00:16:32]Next, the Fourth Amendment, the March 9th stop, the one the officer said he stretched to scare him a little. That's your Rodriguez claim, and the officer's narrated motive makes it a live one. The warrant search that found nothing with the officer who knew the host, that's your Franks claim, but only if the searcher and the affiant turned out to be the same person, and it's the harder claim regardless because Franks sets a high bar, and you'd need the actual affidavit.

[00:17:00]Now, the one I'll be honest about being weak. Remember that shoulder, the arm Ben says was wrenched at the arrest, the X-ray that turned out to be a stock photo, the ski injury from days before.

[00:17:12]That's an excessive force claim, and the law there asks whether the force was reasonable for the situation, judged in the moment by what an officer faced. On what we can see, the claim is thin, and the stock X-ray problem does real damage to his credibility on it. I'm not going to inflate it for you. A good lawyer drops a weak claim precisely so the jury trusts the strong ones.

[00:17:35]And there's a structural claim worth naming. Suing individual officers is one thing, suing the city for a policy, a custom, a way of doing business is harder. It's called a Monell claim, and it needs more than one bad day. It needs a pattern.

[00:17:50]The recurring business of muting body cameras at decision points, the practice of broad redactions blamed on the county attorney, if discovery showed these were systemic, not one-offs, that's where a case against the department itself, not just the officers, would live.

[00:18:07]One more honest note, and it cuts toward Ben, not away. He's been granted the right to represent himself in the criminal case. Representing yourself in a stalking prosecution built on witnesses while continuing to post inflammatory videos that the other side can introduce as evidence, that is a dangerous way to live. The civil rights lawsuit is the exciting story, the four misdemeanors are the urgent one. Those are not the same case, and the urgent one is the one that can put him in a cell.

[00:18:36]So, that's the sort. A strong filming claim, a live Rodriguez claim, a hard Franks claim, a weak force claim, a structural Monell claim that lives or dies in discovery.

[00:18:47]You'd think that ranking is the whole ballgame, that the strongest wrong wins and the weakest loses. It isn't. There's a doctrine that reshorts all of it, and it doesn't care how bad the conduct was.

[00:19:01]That doctrine is qualified immunity. If you've watched this channel for a while, you know it, and you know it makes people angry. I want to do something better than make you angry. I want to show you the machine because the machine is stranger than the anger.

[00:19:14]Qualified immunity asks two questions in order. One, did the official violate a constitutional right? Two, was that right clearly established at the time?

[00:19:25]Meaning, had a court already held on facts close enough to these that this specific conduct was unconstitutional?

[00:19:32]You need a yes to both to get past it. A yes on the first and a no to the second and the officer walks. Not because he didn't do it, because no one had been told clearly enough in advance that doing it was illegal. The trap lives in those two words, clearly established, and there's a quieter feature underneath them that most people never hear about and it's the one I want you to take away from this video. A court is allowed to skip the first question entirely. It can say, "We are not going to decide whether these officers violated the Constitution because even if they did, the right wasn't clearly established. So, they're immune and we're done."

[00:20:08]Sit with what that does over time. If courts keep resolving these cases on the second question without answering the first, then the first question never gets answered.

[00:20:18]The conduct never gets ruled unconstitutional because the court keeps skipping the part where it would rule, which means the law never becomes clearly established, which means the next person on the very same facts also loses at the second question because it still isn't clearly established because no court ever established it.

[00:20:37]The doctrine can feed itself. The one thing that would break the loop, a court actually saying this was unconstitutional, is the exact thing the doctrine lets the court avoid saying.

[00:20:48]Now, watch this case resort itself because this is the part I find genuinely clarifying.

[00:20:54]Take the same claims I just ranked and run them through that second question instead of through the how bad the conduct was.

[00:21:03]Start with filming. The right to record the police in public was made clearly established in the 10th Circuit, the federal circuit that covers Utah, by name, in 2022, in a case called Irizarry.

[00:21:18]So, on the filming retaliation claim, the second question is already answered.

[00:21:23]An officer in Utah after 2022 cannot say, "I didn't know."

[00:21:27]That claim can clear the shield.

[00:21:30]And let me be precise, because the precision is the point. Irizarry establishes the right to record. It does not establish that these officers retaliated. I'm assuming that part for the sake of the analysis, not asserting that it's proven.

[00:21:44]What I'm telling you is that if the retaliation happened, this shield does not save them on that one. The line was already drawn.

[00:21:52]Now, the prolonged stop and the warrant.

[00:21:55]Rodriguez and Franks are real rules, and I just walked you through them, but here's the cruelty of the second question. It is not enough that the rule exists in the abstract.

[00:22:05]To beat qualified immunity, you need a prior case close enough on its facts that any reasonable officer would have known that this conduct in this situation crossed this line.

[00:22:17]Whether a case that specific exists for a prolonged stop to scare him a little, for a warrant tied to an officer who knew the tipster, is genuinely contestable.

[00:22:30]I'm not going to tell you those claims clear the shield, because I don't know yet that they do.

[00:22:35]And that is the maddening lesson stated plainly. Which of Ben's claims survives may have nothing to do with which conduct was worse. It turns on the accident of whether some earlier court on some earlier set of facts already happened to draw the line.

[00:22:54]Same incident, same officers, the filming claim can beat the shield because a 2022 case happened to exist.

[00:23:02]The claims that may smell worse, the stop stretched to frighten a man, the empty search can die at the second question because the right case never got decided.

[00:23:13]The wrong and the remedy have come unhooked from one another.

[00:23:18]So there's your second door.

[00:23:20]The police left the digital door open by accident and the footage walked out and it can never be walked back in.

[00:23:27]Qualified immunity is the other door, the legal one. And unlike the first, it is built to close. It is the door that lets a court send everyone home without ever ruling whether your rights were violated at all.

[00:23:39]One door the state couldn't shut, one door designed so the state rarely has to open it.

[00:23:47]So suppose every claim I walked through is real.

[00:23:50]The retaliation, the prolonged stop, all of it. Ben might still lose and he might lose at that second door for a reason that has nothing to do with whether it happened, only with whether some court somewhere already wrote it down clearly enough.

[00:24:06]But here's the thing about that other door, the open one.

[00:24:09]48 gigabytes of unedited police operations are now mirrored on the internet archive permanently for anyone on Earth to download. The court of public opinion doesn't run on qualified immunity. It doesn't ask whether a precedent was clearly established. It just watches the footage.

[00:24:29]So we've arrived somewhere strange. The verdict of the internet may rest on more raw evidence and hold a longer memory than the courtroom ever will.

[00:24:40]A judge can close the legal door.

[00:24:42]The footage closes nothing. It sits there on a server no one can reach, waiting.

[00:24:49]And it leaves me with one uncomfortable question the kind of lets you sit with.

[00:24:53]If a single accidental Dropbox link can show how one small department actually operates when it thinks the audio is off.

[00:25:01]How many other departments are sitting on terabytes of carefully redacted footage right now, perfectly tailored to protect the official story, simply because no one there has made the clerical error yet?

[00:25:15]There's the thing the next viral police video should make you wonder.

[00:25:19]Not just what the camera showed, what the audio sounded like before somebody uploaded it.

[00:25:25]The next time anyone in this story stands in front of a judge, the footage will already be there, and for the first time both sides will have to talk about what's actually on it under oath, where syncing audio in your bedroom doesn't count and a stock x-ray gets you sanctioned.

[00:25:42]I'll be here for that, reading the record, telling you which parts are solid and which parts are a man in a bedroom with editing software, because the difference between these two things is my job.

[00:25:54]Thanks for watching. I'm Leonard French, your favorite copyright attorney, and I want to hear what you think. Please share your thoughts in the comments.

[00:26:00]Before I go, the people who make this channel possible. First, the five who have given the most over the years, Evie, here since 2017, Ugly Grill, John Steel, who've been around since the beginning, Tech Tech Potato and the Blood Soaked Survivors. That kind of sustained support is not something I take for granted. On Floatplane, Placeholder and Creatures, both here since the early days, and YouTube, John Swanson, a member for nearly six years, and dozens more of you across Patreon, Floatplane and YouTube. I'm putting you on the screen now. Every one of you has put something behind my work. I read your names and I know who you are. From your favorite copyright attorney, thank you.

[00:26:40]I've also been building a web app that makes it easy to send quick messages to your congressional representatives via postcards.

[00:26:46]Letters get screened, emails are easy to ignore, but postcards postcards get read. If you think Congress needs to hear from you, this is a great way to do it. Check it out at postcardstocongress.org.

[00:26:57]Use coupon code just $5 to send postcards to all three of your congress critters for just $5.

[00:27:03]Until next time, I love you all. Have a great day.

[00:27:06]Bye.