Summary: A North Carolina attorney who moonlights as an Uber driver recorded a lying police officer bullying him.
A North Carolina police officer learned an important lesson recently–You better not lie because you never know who you’re talking to.
A video went viral this week of a cop lying to Uber driver, Jesse Bright. The police had allegedly seen Bright pick up a passenger from a known drug house, so they pulled over his vehicle. When Sgt. Kenneth Becker of Wilmington Police Department saw that Bright was recording the interaction, he told him that it was illegal to record an officer. That’s when things got ugly.
Bright told Becker that it was his right to record, and he knew this because he was a lawyer.
Sgt. Becker at first was in disbelief–Bright’s a lawyer and an Uber driver?
Turns out, Bright was telling the truth, and Becker wasn’t. Bright works full-time as a defense attorney, but to supplement his income, he drives for Uber in the evenings. In a follow-up video, he explained to police that he makes almost $700-$800 a week as a driver and that he needed to pay off his law school debt.
Becker said that he recorded the police interaction to protect himself, and he had video of the policeman lying to him about not being able to record the police as well as the subsequent search of his car.
Becker told WWAY that this incident puts a spotlight on a bigger problem that he has witnessed as a criminal attorney.
“If [the cop’s] willing to directly lie to me, and tell me you know this is against the law to film police, then it worries me you know most people when they’re given an order by an officer they don’t know that it’s an unlawful order,” Bright said.
New Hanover County Sheriff Ed McMahon said that his department welcomes citizens filming the police and that the sergeant in the video was wrong. Becker has since been counseled.
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