Just one day after the Baltimore Police Department released a directive affirming citizens’ right to videotape police officers performing their duties in public, police appear to have violated the policy.

Scott Cover sent us the link to this video he shot from his cell phone in the wee hours of Saturday morning in rainy Federal Hill. Cover said he happened upon police officers arresting a man outside a bar and decided to record the scene.

(Cover said he was prompted in part by remembering recent news coverage about the new video policy, which was released just ahead of a Monday federal court hearing in the case of a man filming an arrest at the 2010 Preakness Stakes.)

In Cover’s video, the officers can be heard telling him, forcefully, to leave. A female police officer crosses the street to approach him, with what appears to be pepper spray in her hand, warning him that “you’re going to go to jail.”

Cover can be heard citing the new policy (“You guys do know you have a standing order to allow people to record”) and one officer’s response suggests he is aware of it – and specifically taking another approach to squelching citizen videographers.

“You’re loitering,” he tells Cover. “Nobody took your phone away. You can film all you want.”

Asked what happened afterwards, Cover said, via email, he “made a rookie mistake” and turned off the camera, gave up his ID “and took a verbal berating for having been there, while four cops stood around me and the Lt continuing to say she could take me to jail with the handcuffs in her hand.”

“That was the part that was most strange to me,” Cover wrote. “Why do four cops have to chase a citizen, who is leaving the scene as requested, down a street with handcuffs saying, ‘I’ve told you to leave how many times,” when he is obviously leaving the scene.”

Asked what he will do next, Cover said he is not looking to sue the department (“I was never touched during this incident nor was my recording device”), but he said he has contacted his lawyer and “plans to pursue an apology.”

Cover said his attempts to discuss what happen with police officials the next day were frustrating. He said he reached a sergeant who said that “people like me were the problem because they had no idea why I was taping them and that for all they knew I was going to try and post it on YouTube.”

Cover said he informed her that he had already done exactly that, “at which point she went off about the officer involved with the skateboarders and how you only saw the video and not what had happened before and after the video was shown.”

“Right now,” Cover said,  in closing, “I’m actually kind of afraid to walk around my neighborhood (I work & live in Federal Hill) for fear that an officer will recognize me and harass me further, this time without my camera out.”