In the last few years, smartphones have become cheaper and more plentiful. According to recent statistics, the number of cellphones in the hands of Americans has been rising steadily every year. It is estimated that 182.6 million Americans will own a smartphone in 2015, an increase from 163.9 million in the previous year.

182 million smartphones means that nearly every adult in the country has a camera in their pocket.

Since the increase in smartphones, there has also been an increase in police brutality videos. This increase in videos led to the question of whether brutality is on the rise or merely that the frequency of filming the instances has risen.

While the answer to this question is up for debate, one thing is certain — the number of police brutality allegations being substantiated by video has increased.

New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board is an independent agency that is empowered to receive, investigate, mediate, hear, make findings, and recommend action on complaints against New York City police officers. According to the CCRB, nearly half (45%) of all claims of brutality and excessive force of NYPD cops have been substantiated by video in the first six months of 2015.

The camera is power as it is a means of exposing unacceptable behavior — and police are beginning to understand its power.

In the video below, Cameron Ford begins filming what he refers to as an unauthorized arrest. It appears that during the incident, the officer looks back at the man filming, realizes that he is being held accountable, and then ceases his false arrest.

According to Ford:

This video right here proves why you should ALWAYS FILM THE POLICE. This is the same very officer who trumped up charges on me stemming from an arrest days earlier on Wednesday, October 14th 2015.

I saw the same officer arresting someone else for absolutely nothing. Several people got my attention saying that same cop is arresting a black male for NO REASON, I pulled out my camera and started documenting the arrest by filming from a distance. The Police Sgt,. on the bike (Sgt. Hall) advised the arresting officer, that I was filming, you see the officer look back at me with a sneaky mischievous grin and then you see him unhandcuff the male and release him back into the wild.

In a second clip, you will see the officer Stare me down, like I am going to get payback on you. Again days earlier he trumped up 3 felony charges on me, in a great attempt to have me sitting and rotting in jail for crimes I never committed.

COLUMBUS, OH – Less than three months after the announcement of Cell 411, the version 2 of the app was just released with major improvements aimed at creating a broader, de-centralized means for world-wide users to manage and respond to all kinds of emergencies, using small trust-based networks of friends and family members. When alerted for help, the responders will receive turn by turn directions to the location where one needs help, an estimated time of arrival and distance to their location.

While the app was born out of activists’ need to maintain police accountability, track events with GPS accuracy and send out real-time alerts, the Cell 411 platform now includes other default alerts aimed at helping school kids when they are being bullied, and a “general alert” which can be customized to alert the trusted network of any particular emergency or event taking place.

In the past, various mobile applications have attempted to bridge the gap between citizens and the State when dealing with various emergency situations, but Cell 411 has now gone above and beyond any previous generation app, especially with the new Patrol Mode, a feature the developers hope to be widely adopted by activists, neighborhood watches and other groups of citizens who wish to participate in improving their communities without help from police or government employees.

“Patrol Mode allows every citizen to become a ‘private helper’ of sorts. Think ‘Uber’ for emergencies or other urgent needs,” says the creator of the Cell Platform, Virgil Vaduva. “It’s a revolutionary approach to calling out for help and reaching out to help those people when they call on you. In my mind, this is all about our society peacefully evolving to a place where the State’s monopoly on violence is no longer needed and government employees such as police and others will have competition from concerned and voluntary members of the community,” he said.

When enabled in the app, Patrol Mode allows users to respond to global alerts sent by others within a specific radius, up to 50 miles. This feature could be particularly useful in case of large civil unrests, car problems, or other situations where someone could be far from home without ability to call on immediate friends for help.

If those new features were not enough, in Version 2, the creators introduced the most striking feature, the Live Video alerting. When triggered, a live video feed will be streamed and recorded to the user’s trusted network, giving them the ability to maintain visual awareness and knowledge of the situation. Furthermore, the recorded video may not be erased by police, thieves, criminals or other malicious users if they steal or confiscate the smart phone, making the destruction of evidence impossible.

“We have volunteer firefighters using this tool as their dispatch tool, and neighborhood watch groups using it to provide self-security services to their communities. Your imagination is really the only limit to how you can use the app to improve your safety and security,” said Vaduva.

The app can currently be purchased for $0.99 in both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.

Recording police is a constitutionally protected right

While Feidin Santana and Ramsey Orta are hardly household names, these men played pivotal roles in one of the most important civil rights stories of our time.

They made news by using their cellphone cameras to record the police killings of two unarmed black men: Walter Scott and Eric Garner. And though they may not have realized it at the time, such recording is constitutionally protected.

But that may be little comfort to people who record tense encounters between police and the public. After filming the April 4 shooting of Walter Scott, Santana told NBC News, “I felt that my life, with this information, might be in danger. I thought about erasing the video and just getting out of the community, you know Charleston, and living some place else.”

Orta, who documented police choking Eric Garner to death on Staten Island, was arrested on an unrelated gun charge the day after the coroner declared Garner’s death a homicide. He was only recently released on bail after a second arrest on a drug charge. After pleading not guilty during a February hearing, Orta told the judge that he was the victim of a “frame-up” as apparent retribution for sharing his Garner video with the media.

Getting the Law Right

The ubiquity of camera-ready smartphones has spawned legions of “citizen journalists” like Santana and Orta. They may not think of themselves as reporters, but they do make news simply by witnessing, recording and sharing newsworthy events. It’s an act that’s become so commonplace that few think twice about recording events as they unfold on the street.

Recording police officers as they go about their duties, however, is a thornier issue.

Less than a month before the video of the Charleston shooting went public, a Texas state legislator introduced a bill that would make it illegal for people to photograph or record within a 25-foot radius of police activity.

Texas Rep. Jason Villalba dropped his bill earlier this week, citing a backlash from “far-left civil libertarians” and “far-right people who believe that we were somehow limiting First Amendment rights.”

Villalba’s confusion about these rights puts him in the unfortunate company of other lawmakers and law enforcement.

In March 2014, the Illinois Supreme Court struck down the Illinois Eavesdropping Law, which had made the recording of police officers without their consent a felony, punishable by four to 15 years in prison. The law, which had led to a number of arrests across the state, had the support of state police and prosecutors.

Earlier this month, a video surfaced on social media of an incident involving Virginia teens pulled over by police for what initially seemed a routine traffic stop. The driver, Courtney Griffith, turned on her video camera as several Virginia Beach police officers pepper-sprayed and Tasered her 17-year-old friend, Brandon Wyne, while he sat in the back seat. Following her arrest, the police confiscated Griffith’s cellphone and deleted the video of the encounter, but she was able to recover the file and share it on social media.

In June 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that police cannot search a person’s cellphone without a warrant. Authorities are investigating the Virginia Beach incident but it appears that the police violated both Griffith’s First Amendment right to record and her Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable government searches and seizures.

The ruling builds on earlier efforts from Obama’s Department of Justice. In 2012, the DoJ intervened in a case before the U.S. District Court of Maryland with an unequivocal statement of support for an individual’s “First Amendment right to record police officers in the public discharge of their duties.”

“Officers violate citizens’ Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights when they seize and destroy such recordings without warrant or due process,” added the Department’s civil rights attorneys.

The Law vs. Law Enforcement

While the courts and DoJ have been clear about our right to record, that message hasn’t always filtered through to the local level, according to photojournalist Carlos Miller, who has spent the last eight years documenting many incidents of police harassment of photographers.

“Until we have stronger disciplinary action against police, officers are not going to shy away from making these sorts of arrests,” Miller said in a phone interview.

A bill being debated this week in the Colorado statehouse could help people in that state. It would fine police officers up to $15,000 for seizing or destroying a person’s camera or interfering with someone trying to film them.

Many police forces are considering plans to equip on-duty officers with body cameras, which would record their every encounter with the public. But Miller remains skeptical. “We cannot depend on the police to protect our rights,” he said. “Citizens will have to be the ones who will police the police — as we’ve seen in South Carolina.”

Miller predicts an increase in arrests over the summer as more people are out on the streets enjoying better weather. Consider the epidemic of police shootings in light of a recent Pew Research Center finding that mobile phone usage among U.S. adults has soared above 90 percent, and it’s likely that videos of police abuse will become even more common.

While the technology has changed, our constitutional rights haven’t. But how do we translate long-standing free speech and privacy protections at a time when anyone with a mobile phone has the potential to engage in an act of journalism? We need to ensure that these rights, in this new context, are understood but also respected by everyone.

As more bystanders use cellphones to document the police, law enforcement must get behind the laws that protect our right to record.