Arrested for Videotaping

[swake]

Almost every farmer or rancher I have ever met prefers to do large transactions in cash, such as the purchase of a bull or a piece of machinery.
I think it's a mindset of rural folk not to filter all their finances through a bank, and misconduct by the "too large to fail" institutions seems to have reenforced that in recent years. 
It's not a crime to possess or deal in cash, nor are people who do so criminals just for exercising that option.

As far as the "war on drugs" being outsourced to armed robbers, enough people have died from being Tasered that being threatened with one would put you in fear for your life.  That District Attorney might as well have a contract with Los Zetas, since they have so much law experience.

But back on topic, it's pretty clear that this man was stopped from documenting something that they knew was illegal.

he should have gone to the DA and pressed charges for grand theft against the officers.

[Vashta Nerada]

he should have gone to the DA and pressed charges for grand theft against the officers.

Apparently the DA is the ringleader.

[swake]

Apparently the DA is the ringleader.

I get that.

[patric]

San Francisco firefighters had been using helmet cameras to evaluate how they handle fire scenes, but the Chief recently banned the use of cameras after they recorded a tragic mishap where a teen was run over by a fire truck.

Apparently keeping people in the dark was more expedient than developing a policy.
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SF-fire-chief-bans-helmet-cameras-in-wake-of-crash-4741338.php


"The department seems more concerned with exposure and liability than training and improving efficiency," Smith said. "Helmet cams are the wave of the future - they can be used to improve communication at incidents between firefighters and commanders.
"The department should develop a progressive policy to use this tool in a way that is beneficial and not simply restrict its use," Smith said. "We are public servants, we serve the public - why be secretive?"


"Why would anybody not want to know the truth?" he said. "What's wrong with knowing what happened? What's wrong with keeping people honest?
He said video recordings increasingly are "critically important" in reconstructing first responders' actions at disaster scenes, "the same way that airplanes have cockpit voice recorders and data recorders. The idea that the Fire Department wants to prevent these cameras from being used, it's really disturbing."

He said as long as patient privacy issues are respected and firefighters are careful not to record grisly accident scenes, helmet-camera footage can help a department.
"It's good to the watch the tape - like any pro football team, they watch the tape of how they did at the last game," Pace said. "It's better than a live fire exercise, because it's a real fire. It's invaluable. More departments are starting to embrace it - the trend is toward it as opposed to departments running away from it."
Pace said he understands fire officials' concerns about liability issues, but "liability doesn't mean you can just keep things quiet and brush them under the rug."

[patric]

 
(Reuters) - A New York police officer has been indicted on three felony counts of falsifying records to justify his arrest last year of a New York Times photographer, the Bronx district attorney said.

A Bronx grand jury indicted NYPD officer Michael Ackermann on Monday in a case stemming from his arrest in August 2012 of photographer Robert Stolarik, whom Ackermann said had interfered with the arrest of a teenage girl.

Ackermann, 30, said in a police report at the time that Stolarik had repeatedly set off the flash on his camera in his face - blinding and distracting him - during the arrest.
But Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson said in a statement that an investigation determined that Stolarik's camera did not have a flash attached at the time of the arrest, which took place at 10:30 p.m. on August 4, 2012.

Ackerman was indicted on three felony counts and five misdemeanor counts of falsifying records and making false statements.
He faces up to seven years in prison if convicted of the most serious felony, tampering with public records. Ackermann was released without bail on Monday following an arraignment in state court in the Bronx.
He has been suspended without pay pending the outcome of his criminal case, NYPD Deputy Commissioner John McCarthy said.

Stolarik was photographing the arrest of a teenage girl following a street fight when a police officer told him to stop taking pictures, according to an account of the incident published last year in the New York Times. Stolarik said he identified himself as a Times photographer and continued to shoot pictures.

A second officer grabbed his camera and "slammed" it into his face, he told the newspaper. He said police took his cameras and roughed him up before arresting him on charges of obstructing government administration and resisting arrest.

Following the arrest, police officials said Stolarik and others had been repeatedly ordered to move back, but that Stolarik pressed forward and inadvertently struck an officer in the face with his camera. They said Stolarik "violently" resisted arrest.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/27/us-usa-newyork-policemisconduct-idUSBRE97Q0T520130827
http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_69/photogsreport.html

[patric]

Smithsonian Guards Grab Photographer Shooting Protest Inside Air and Space Museum
http://dcist.com/2013/12/smithsonian_guards_tackle_photograp.php

http://blogs.nppa.org/advocacy/files/2013/12/Smithsonian_complaint.pdf

[TeeDub]

"Tripplaar said the guards slammed him into the ground."

You can see him going down in the pictures.    Looks pretty controlled.   Ask a black man if it counts as "slamming" without your head bouncing off the pavement at least once.

[Vashta Nerada]

http://www.bakersfieldcalifornian.com/local/x651132658/Debate-erupts-over-cell-phone-video-of-Silva-beating-by-officers-Witness-I-can-still-hear-him

The 911 call records witness Sulina Quair saying, “There is a man laying on the floor and your police officers beat the (expletive) out of him and killed him. I have it all on video camera. We videotaped the whole thing.”

The 911 operator asks her supervisor to handle the call and Quair continues, saying she is:

“On the corner of Flower and Palm right now and you have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight sheriffs. The guy was laying on the floor and eight sheriffs ran up and started beating him up with sticks. The man is dead laying right here, right now.”

She adds, “I got it all on video camera and I’m sending it to the news. These cops have no reason to do this to this man.”

The communications supervisor asks for her phone number so a watch commander can call her. She provides it.

On Friday, Quair said Thirty-three-year-old David Sal Silva, the father of four young children’s screams and bloody face still haunted her. She was about 20 feet way from Silva as he struggled with deputies.

“I have been crying a lot and his voice just plays over and over in my head,” Quair said Friday. “I sit there and I can still hear him choking in his own blood, trying to gasp for air.”

“It just so happened that we were at the right place at the right time to be able to videotape the murdering that took place,” Melendez said.

One result of the call to 911 was that deputies seized Melendez’s phone Wednesday morning while she was at her daughter Melissa’s home.
More details emerged Friday of how officers took the witness’s cell phones.

Melissa Quair’s boyfriend also had taken video of the incident and at 3 a.m. two sheriff’s detectives arrived at her home to confiscate the boyfriend’s phone.

“At about 3 a.m. two detectives showed up, barged in without my permission and demanded to see my boyfriend for his phone,” Melissa said.

In that video, Melissa said Friday, it is very clear that the deputies were beating Silva. At one point, she recalled, the deputies had Silva hogtied and they lifted him and dropped him twice and asked if he was still with them.

She said she and her boyfriend were essentially kept captive inside their own home until they released their phones.

As was reported earlier, the boyfriend eventually gave up his phone without a search warrant being presented because he had to be at work at 8 a.m. and didn’t want to be late, she said.

“They lied to us and said that they would personally deliver the phone back to us the next day but when we called they said they were keeping the phone until the investigation was over,” she said.

Later in the morning, Melendez showed up at Melissa’s house and was immediately confronted by the same two detectives who told her she had to turn over her phone, she said.

Melendez said she wasn’t going to give up her phone without a search warrant and was then again told that the search warrant was on its way.

“We all know that a picture is worth a thousand words,” lawyer Cohn said during the news conference. “And thank God we have concerned citizens who take video and pictures of incidents like this and who are ultimately policing the police.”

Cohn has sent letters to government agencies requesting that any videos that were collected not be altered or tampered with. He sent the letters, he said, to the Sheriff’s Department, California Highway Patrol and Bakersfield Police Department, in addition to city and county attorneys.

The Sheriff’s Office has not informed Cohn or the family of the status of an autopsy done Thursday, but Cohn is confident the results will be accurate.

Friday morning, the coroner’s office reported that the cause of death is pending toxicology and microscopic studies.

At the vigil for Silva Friday afternoon, his father, Sal Silva, kneeled down and touched the blood stains left on the sidewalk from the incident.

“I can’t believe this happened,” he said sobbing. “My son was a family man who loved his kids and family and in the back of my mind I still hold on to the possibility that the body we haven’t seen, might not be my son.”

Said Cohn: “I have two grieving parents and one grieving brother who want to see the body of their son and brother. But we will get to the bottom of this and I ask the sheriff’s department, once again, what are you hiding?”

The sheriff said he's unable to release the cell phones that were seized because they were taken through a search warrant.

Youngblood asserted that only a judge could now order the release of the phones. He said the videos will be released but he didn’t say when.
“We will share everything with the public, including the videos,” Youngblood said.

Melendez said she resented being harassed by detectives.

“I told them that I felt they were making us look like the bad guys, like we were the ones who had killed the man,” Melendez said. “The image of that night still turns my stomach.... It’s overwhelming.



 John Tello, a criminal law attorney, is representing two witnesses who took video footage and five other witnesses to the incident. He said his clients are still shaken by what they saw.

"When I arrived to the home of one of the witnesses that had video footage, she was with her family sitting down on the couch, surrounded by three deputies," Tello said.

Tello said the witness was not allowed to go anywhere with her phone and was being quarantined inside her home.

When Tello tried to talk to the witness in private and with the phone, one of the deputies stopped him and told him he couldn't take the phone anywhere because it was evidence to the investigation, the attorney said.

"This was not a crime scene where the evidence was going to be destroyed," Tello said. "These were concerned citizens who were basically doing a civic duty of preserving the evidence, not destroying it as they (sheriff deputies) tried to make it seem."

A search warrant wasn't presented to either of the witnesses until after Tello arrived, he said, adding that one phone was seized before the warrant was produced.

Tello said the phone of the first witness was taken after the deputies told him he was either going to give up the phone the easy way or the hard way.

"They basically told him they were either going to keep him at this house all night until they could find a judge to sign a search warrant or he could just turn over his phone," he said.

The witness gave up his phone two hours before he had to get to work and was told by deputies that he could collect his phone the next day after they had extracted the evidence they needed, Tello said.

However, the witness never got his phone back, Tello said, and was told it could take years before he does because the investigation could take a long time.

"My main concern is that these witnesses are not harassed by deputies because this case can make others who see crimes happening not want to speak up because of the way law enforcement handles situations," Tello said.

http://www.bakersfieldcalifornian.com/local/x568091070/Dad-who-died-during-arrest-begged-for-his-life-cops-take-witness-video


 

[patric]

"Sometimes, life is so absurd that your cell phone is the only way to make what occurs believable."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57616215-71/why-more-people-are-training-their-cell-phones-on-police

[rebound]

"Sometimes, life is so absurd that your cell phone is the only way to make what occurs believable."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57616215-71/why-more-people-are-training-their-cell-phones-on-police

This one doesn't look that bad.  The cop obviously doesn't want to be there either, and (as he says) is only there because the neighbor complained.  The audio is a little fuzzy, but I get the impression that the neighbor is accusing these guys of running a detail business in their driveway.  The cop, I think, just wishes he didn't have to mess with that kind of BS.

[heironymouspasparagus]

Has no one learned anything from all the Bond movies - you ALWAYS make a backup before saying something to anyone.  Preferably with multiple copies.  Send one to your lawyer and certified mail to yourself.  Keep one in a safe deposit box if you have one.... NEVER give up your information without cover. 

[patric]

Looks like Homeland Security is the new muscle for the ..get this... Motion Picture Association of America:

http://the-gadgeteer.com/2014/01/20/amc-movie-theater-calls-fbi-to-arrest-a-google-glass-user


About an hour into the movie, a guy comes near my seat, shoves a badge that had some sort of a shield on it, yanks the Google Glass off my face and says “follow me outside immediately”. It was quite embarrassing and outside of the theater there were about 5-10 cops and mall cops. Since I didn’t catch his name in the dark of the theater, I asked to see his badge again and I asked what was the problem and I asked for my Glass back. The response was “you see all these cops you know we are legit, we are with the ‘federal service’ and you have been caught illegally taping the movie”.

    What followed was over an hour of the “feds” telling me I am not under arrest, and that this is a “voluntary interview”, but if I choose not to cooperate bad things may happen to me.  I kept telling them that Glass has a USB port and not only did I allow them, I actually insist they connect to it and see that there was nothing but personal photos with my wife and my dog on it.  I also insisted they look at my phone too and clear things out, but they wanted to talk first. They wanted to know who I am, where I live, where I work, how much I’m making, how many computers I have at home, why am I recording the movie, who am I going to give the recording to, why don’t I just give up the guy up the chain, ’cause they are not interested in me.

[guido911]

Happy President's Day to you-know-who...

http://splashurl.com/pwo6b28

[DolfanBob]

And another.

http://www.local10.com/news/woman-who-recorded-traffic-stop-spends-night-in-jail/24532912

[Cats Cats Cats]

I had a rent-a-cop come ask me if I was taking pictures of people coming in and out of the 320 S Boston building.  I showed him what I was doing and why I was out there so long.  He didn't push it further.  Its amazing how dangerous a camera is....