At issue, besides the scary camera, was the young man's refusal to sign in at the front desk, a long standing policy at Emeryville City Hall, a policy without the force of law. The cameraman tries to calm down the public servants by explaining, correctly, that people don't have to surrender their Fourth Amendment rights to access publicly accessible government buildings. Any areas of City Hall that are not specifically for authorized personal only, and properly signed to indicate that, are open to the public.
Bay Area Transparency has been active since 2019 and has 142 videos with 44 million views with an average of 290 thousand views per day. It is part of a whole genre of YouTube channels conducting 'First Amendment audits' by video recording in public forums to document government employees and their acceptance or lack of acceptance of people's First Amendment rights. These videos have shown many police departments in the Bay Area and beyond, authoritarian and prone to falsely arrest members of the public who record police activities. The Emeryville police featured in the video show a reasonable level of professionalism, unlike the City Hall staff.
To the Emeryville City Hall staff: You can ask us to sign in at the front desk (without coercion) when we come to our city hall but we don't have to do it if we don't want to. We can chose to access our government anonymously. Don't call the police on people not breaking the law in their own building. And calm down for christ's sake. It's a public building and the public is invited in to partake in their government, even those who have scary cameras and who know their rights.
