A federal appeals court has already settled a question that a lot of drivers assume is still up for grabs: can you legally livestream your own traffic stop while it’s happening? In February 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in Sharpe v. Winterville that the First Amendment protects exactly that. The case didn’t come from an activist test lawsuit. It came from a passenger in North Carolina who had his phone grabbed out of his hand for doing precisely what the court later said he had every right to do.
The Stop That Started It
The case traces back to October 2018, when Dijon Sharpe was riding as a passenger in a vehicle pulled over by Winterville, North Carolina police. Sharpe began broadcasting the stop live on Facebook. According to the account detailed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an officer noticed the livestream, grabbed Sharpe, and reached for his phone in an attempt to shut the broadcast down. The city later confirmed this wasn’t one officer improvising. It reflected an actual department policy directing officers to stop passengers from livestreaming stops in real time, reportedly over concerns that a live feed could expose an officer’s location to anyone watching.
Sharpe sued, and the case worked its way up to the Fourth Circuit, which covers Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North and South Carolina.
What the Court Actually Ruled
The panel’s holding was direct: livestreaming your own traffic stop counts as protected speech. As the court put it, in language highlighted by the FindLaw legal blog’s coverage of the opinion, “recording police encounters creates information that contributes to discussion about governmental affairs. So too does livestreaming disseminate that information.” In other words, the court treated real-time broadcasting the same way it treats recording generally, as the creation and distribution of information about how government officials conduct themselves in public, which sits close to the core of what the First Amendment is designed to protect.
That reasoning put livestreaming in the same category as the broader right to record police, which the ABA Journal’s reporting on the ruling notes has now been recognized in some form by a majority of the federal circuits, not just the Fourth. The Fourth Circuit’s contribution was narrowing in on the livestreaming piece specifically, since broadcasting in real time raises different practical questions than recording footage to upload later.
The Catch: A Win Without a Payout
Here’s where the ruling gets complicated for anyone hoping it settles everything. Sharpe still didn’t get to collect damages from the officer who grabbed his phone. The court applied qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that shields individual officers from personal liability unless the specific right they violated was “clearly established” at the time they acted. Because no prior court had spelled out a right to livestream a traffic stop back in 2018, the officer was protected from being sued personally, even though the underlying policy that authorized his conduct was found unconstitutional going forward.
That combination, a real constitutional right recognized for the future paired with no consequence for the past violation, is common in these cases and often confuses people reading about the outcome. The town’s policy was struck down. The right now exists on the books in five states. But the individual who had to fight for it walked away without compensation for what happened to him.
What It Means Behind the Wheel Today
For drivers and passengers in Fourth Circuit states, the practical takeaway is straightforward: an officer confiscating or disabling your phone specifically to stop a livestream during a stop is now on much shakier legal ground than it was in 2018. Outside those five states, the ruling isn’t binding, but it adds to a growing body of appellate precedent moving in the same direction, and it’s the kind of decision other circuits tend to look at when a similar case lands on their docket.
None of this erases an officer’s authority to conduct the stop itself, ask for your documents, or take reasonable safety precautions. What it does is draw a clearer line around the specific act of broadcasting the encounter as it unfolds, treating that broadcast as speech the Constitution protects rather than a threat an officer can shut down on the spot.