A Massachusetts man charged with wiretapping in 2014 for filming a local police officer with his iPhone is settling a federal civil rights lawsuit for $72,500.

According to court documents, a Fall River man named George Thompson saw a police officer outside his house cursing into his mobile phone while working traffic detail. The lawsuit said that Thompson began filming the officer, Thomas Barboza, with his mobile phone. The officer eventually pushed Thompson, 53, to the ground and handcuffed him, according to the lawsuit (PDF). Thompson spent a night in jail.

The arresting officer received a one-day suspension for conduct unbecoming of an officer—that is speaking profanities in public. The Fall River police erased the footage from the phone by typing in wrong passwords at least 10 times, which prompted the iPhone to restore to factory settings. That erasure was among the reasons the authorities dropped the wiretapping charges against Thompson, as the alleged evidence had been destroyed.

"There were some egregious facts in this one. He was recording the officer from his own front porch," David Milton, Thompson's attorney, told Ars in a telephone interview. "The officer became enraged that he was being recorded."

Under Massachusetts state law, it's considered wiretapping to record somebody without their consent. The police report, according to court documents, said Thompson had the "phone to his chest area in a hiding motion." According to an internal affairs report, the arresting officer told Thompson that he was going to repeatedly drive by his residence and "fuck him hard on paper" (PDF). That latter remark refers to fabricating a police report.

In May 2014, four months after Thompson's arrest, the department initiated a new policy in which "extraordinary" circumstances must justify a wiretapping arrest.

The settlement comes two weeks after the latest proposal to ban filming police officers was announced in Arizona. The proposal from Republican state Sen. John Kavanagh, which includes penalties of a $300 fine and up to six months in jail, comes as lawmakers nationwide grapple with a new YouTube society of sorts. In light of high-profile incidents, filming the police has become a routine endeavor.

The Fall River Police Department initially said the incident was Thompson's fault.

"Plaintiff's injuries and or damages, if any, were proximately caused by his own negligent or intentional conduct and/or by the conduct of others, and not by the conduct of Thomas Barboza," according to the department's response (PDF) to the lawsuit before it was settled. The police officer also maintained that he "at all times acted in good faith upon reasonable belief... that his actions were in accordance with the Constitution and laws of the United States and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts."

Four months after Thompson's arrest, a federal appeals court said the public had the First Amendment right to film cops in public. The decision is but one in a string of decisions that have generally overturned laws nationwide barring the outright recording of police as they perform their duties.