AURORA | The American Civil Liberties Union in Colorado launched a free mobile app last week to encourage people to film and send recordings of police activity to the organization.

The app is already available in nine other states, including California, Michigan and Missouri. In Missouri, the ACLU released the app to be used during protests in Ferguson after a grand jury declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown.

The app allows users to upload content to the organization in real time so the material will be saved even if the recording is stopped for any reason. The ACLU expects another 11 states to launch apps before the end of the year, said John Krieger, spokesman for the ACLU’s Colorado chapter.

Law enforcement officials in Colorado have said they support people’s right to record police in public and that they do not object to the ACLU’s app, which is called “Mobile Justice CO.”

Aurora police Detective Bob Wesner, president of the police officers’ union, said officers don’t have any problem with people recording them. 

“As long as they are not interfering with the officer conducting their investigation and duties as police officers,” he said.

While people recording officers isn’t as common as some assume it is, it happens often enough that officers are used to it, Wesner said.

“We know we are being recorded, so that’s not surprising,” he said.

Even before state lawmakers tackled the issue last spring with a bill — which the Colorado Association of Police Chiefs opposed — that sets a fine of $15,000 for a municipality if an officer interferes with a person trying to record them, Aurora was looking into the issue.

In 2008 the department issued a directive to officers telling them not to interfere if someone tried to record them as long as the person recording them did not interfere with an investigation.

A teenager stopped last year for openly carrying a shotgun on East Iliff Avenue recorded his encounter with police and put the video on YouTube. The seven-minute video has been viewed more than 71,000 times since.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the group Aurora Cop Watch regularly recorded police officers during traffic stops, arrests and other police actions.

The ACLU says citizens’ recordings of police are increasingly becoming an accountability tool.

“We must remember that it is the cameras in our own hands, the cameras that so many of us now carry with us every day, that are the greatest protection against abuses of police power,” said Nathan Woodliff-Stanley, the executive director of the ACLU in Colorado. He cited as an example the April shooting death of Walter Scott in South Carolina. A bystander’s cellphone video showed North Charleston officer Michael Slager firing eight times as Scott ran away from a traffic stop.

“No one would know about Walter Scott in South Carolina if someone had not filmed what happened there,” Woodliff-Stanley said.

The most recent recording of law enforcement to go viral also happened in South Carolina, where a Richland County sheriff’s deputy was captured on video flipping a 16-year-old girl out of her desk at her math class. Sheriff Leon Lott fired the deputy and urged the public to take more videos of law enforcement, saying, “Our citizens should police the police.”

Krieger said states where the ACLU app is launched typically see tens of thousands of downloads after it becomes available. In southern California, the ACLU’s biggest affiliate, hundreds of thousands of people have downloaded the app, Krieger said.

— Aurora Sentinel reporter Brandon Johansson contributed to this report.