H/T to LibertyIdeals for the link.
September 20, 2010
September 10, 2010
Clarifying the clarification
It’s going to scroll off the front page soon, so I thought I’d better put in a link to this post about the ongoing confusion in Britain over photography and the right of the police to confiscate images or recordings in certain circumstances. I’ve updated the post twice with more information from The Register.
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September 8, 2010
New Police policy: photography not illegal, but we’ll safeguard it for you
British police forces may be starting to accept that photography is legal in public spaces, but the Sussex police have come up with a new and sneaky way to get between photographers and their equipment:
According to a statement by Sussex Police: “Under Section 19 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act [1984], an officer policing the event seized a video tape from a member of the public. Section 23 of the Act states that this can take place in ‘any place’, providing the officer is lawfully there and has reasonable grounds to believe it provides evidence of a criminal offence.
“The officer reasonably believed the tape contained evidence of a protester being assaulted by someone taking part in the march. It has been seized temporarily to ensure that evidence cannot be inadvertently lost or altered and will be returned, intact, to the owner as soon as possible.”
See, the very worst people to leave in charge of the camera or the storage media are the photographers: those people always take photos just to delete them, out of spite. The plod are totally within their rights to confiscate safeguard it, just to preserve the evidence.
Good luck on getting it back in working order, of course.
Update, 9 September: Jane Fae Ozimek updates the original story with a bit of additional information:
The police officer taking the film claimed legal justification under Section 19 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which permits the police to seize film or memory sticks discovered “under lawful search” and where there are reasonable grounds to believe they provide evidence of a criminal offence.
So far, so straightforward. However, under s.14 of the same legislation, police may not remove “special procedure material” of a journalistic nature without a warrant. The question therefore arises whether Williams’ filming efforts, even though he does not describe himself as “a journalist”, is nonetheless of a journalistic nature.
The waters are further muddied by a letter sent out just four days earlier by Andy Trotter, Chair of ACPO’s Media Advisory Group to all Chief Constables. In it, Mr Trotter reminds police chiefs that there are no powers to prevent the public from taking photographs in a public place. Significantly, he goes on: “We must acknowledge that citizen journalism is a feature of modern life.”
“Once an image has been recorded, the police have no power to delete or confiscate it without a court order.”
Update, 10 September: Clarifying the clarification to the declaration, or something. The Register is still on the case:
It would appear that at this point alarm bells started ringing at ACPO HQ, and late yesterday afternoon we received a further communication from ACPO. A spokeswoman told us: “We have clarified our guidance note to forces, however, as this does not affect the legal right of officers to seize photographic equipment in certain circumstances, such as during the course of a criminal investigation.
“While it is the job of police officers to be vigilant, to keep an eye out for any suspicious behavior and to act accordingly, we have been very clear in expressing our view that the taking of photographs is not normally a cause for concern. Whether s.19 PACE was used appropriately in the case in question would ultimately be a matter for Sussex.”
More to the point, Trotter’s freshly updated advice has been re-issued and now reads: “Once an image has been recorded the police have no power to delete it without a court order; this does not however restrict an officer’s power to seize items where they believe they contain evidence of criminal activity.”
For those readers too busy to play compare and contrast, the original guidance stated that the police have no power to confiscate recorded images, whereas the clarified guidance explains that they have. Clear?
September 6, 2010
When “informers” become “enablers”
Stephan Salisbury writes that many “foiled” terror plots could never have become actual threats . . . without government assistance:
Informers have by now become our first line of defense in our battles with the evildoers, the go-to guys in the never-ending domestic war on terror. They regularly do the dirty work — suggesting and encouraging the plots, laboring as bag men to move the money, fashioning the bombs, and eliciting the flamboyant dialogue, even while following the scripts of their handlers to the letter. They have attended to all the little details that make for the successful and now familiar arrests, criminal complaints, trials, and (for the most part) convictions in the ever-distracting war against . . . what? Al-Qaeda? Terror? Muslims? The inept? The poor?
The Liberty City Seven, the Fort Dix Six, the Detroit Ummah Conspiracy, the Newburgh Four — each has had their fear-filled day in the sun. None of these plots ever came close to happening. How could they? All were bogus from the get-go: money to buy missiles or cell phones or shoes and fancy duds — provided by the authorities; plans for how to use the missiles and bombs and cell phones — provided by authorities; cars for transport and demolition — issued by the authorities; facilities for carrying out the transactions — leased by those same authorities. Played out on landscapes manufactured by federal imagineers, the climax of each drama was foreordained. The failure of the plots would then be touted as the success of the investigations and prosecutions.
It’s often been observed that war is the health of the state. Can we now also say that the war on terror is the health of the intelligence agency?
H/T to Bruce Schneier for the link.
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September 5, 2010
Detroit Police save money by eliminating pistol practice?
At least, based on this story, you’d have to think it’s the most likely answer:
Cop Fires Twelve Shots at Dog, Hits Two Animal Control Workers Instead
[. . .]
Detroit Police needed to remove the dogs, so they called the Michigan Anti-Cruelty Society. While the rescuers were setting traps for the three pit bulls, one got loose and started running towards a police officer. That’s when, we’re told, she pulled her gun and fired off twelve rounds.
[…]
“The police pulled a gun out and shot, but she missed the dog. I guess she was scared or something, and she hit the animal control person,” he said.
One animal rescue worker took a bullet in the back of the leg. Another grazed his back side. A stray bullet also clipped his co-worker’s boot.
Not quite the best advertisement for range safety, weapons handling expertise, or accuracy.
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September 4, 2010
When you’ve lost the Globe, you’ve lost the argument
At least it means you’ve lost the argument to keep the long-gun registry:
The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police cannot be faulted for their recent unanimous vote in support of the national long-gun registry. Police will understandably always want as much information about those they investigate as they can lay their hands on. It is in the nature of their business. A national fingerprint registry of Canadians would no doubt also be seen as an aid to police work. But just because police chiefs would like a long-gun registry does not make it good public policy or a wise public expenditure.
[. . .]
If passed, a vote in Parliament on a Conservative MP’s bill to end the long-gun registry would not represent the end of gun control in Canada. Stringent and necessary requirements will remain in place for handguns, and restricted weapons such as automatic rifles. A process that already requires gun owners to be licensed before obtaining a firearm would remain, with safety and background checks required for gun owners. Rules for safe handling and storage of guns will remain in place. What will end is the cost, the red tape and the stigmatization of the “law-abiding duck hunters and farmers,” often cited by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. In the absence of any meaningful evidence of the long-gun registry’s efficacy, the program should be ended.
I can’t possibly emphasize how unlikely an editorial like this from the Globe and Mail would have seemed just days ago. Did we enter an alternate universe with that New Zealand earthquake? Does Spock not only have a beard, but also a Mohawk and body piercings?
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August 9, 2010
The inevitable decline in public respect for the police
Paul Bonneau examines the declining levels of respect among members of the public for the police:
I’ve gotten the impression lately that cops aren’t getting very much support in Internet forums these days, even in places where in the past you’d find almost unqualified support. About everyone seems fed up with ’em.
I wondered why this should be. Why are they becoming so much more frequently scorned?
[. . .]
I think one reason cops are hated is that people generally don’t like being scrutinized, and put under suspicion for minding their own business; they really, really don’t like that. Cops are always checking you out, looking for a reason to “brace” you (an old meaning of the word that looks very useful these days).
The War on Some Drugs has to cause some hatred, as more and more peoples’ lives are ruined by it. Indeed, this prison industry boondoggle has stained all aspects of the “Justice” system, not just cops.
Another reason is that cops are treated, and see themselves, as superior to the rest of us. In innumerable ways, cops are always given the benefit of the doubt; certainly legally, and also informally — although the latter seems to be fading a bit, as trust in cops fades. They are “The Only Ones”, we are “mundanes”, “proles”, peons. They can lie to us, we can’t lie to them; they can beat us up and torture us, but if we touch them it is “assault”.
Along with this insufferable attitude is a self-regard that what they are about is important and good. I suppose everyone suffers from this malady, but usually it does not impact a person as it does when one runs into a cop in the throes of it. As C.S. Lewis put it, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good, will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” What are cops, if not “omnipotent moral busybodies”? At least when the Mafia runs a protection racket, they don’t deceive themselves they are doing you a benefit. One appreciates the Mafia’s honesty, in comparison.
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August 7, 2010
Protip for British troops: don’t wear your uniform to the Co-op
Apparently, British soldiers (in uniform) are considered “untouchables” by the Co-op grocery chain:
A soldier who had just arrived home from Afghanistan was refused service at a supermarket and told they didn’t serve people in Army uniform.
Sapper Anthony Walls called into a branch of the Co-op for some beers after a gruelling 34-hour journey from Kandahar.[. . .]
The manager told Mr Walls he ‘couldn’t do anything about it’ and refused to serve him while he was in uniform. The soldier — who was on his way to his three-year-old nephew Jack’s birthday party — walked out of the shop in New Addington, Croydon, in a daze.
‘I was deeply hurt,’ he said yesterday. ‘All I was thinking about was getting home to Jack in time to wish him a happy birthday.‘It was great to be home after a difficult journey and I just thought I’d grab a couple of beers — a luxury I hadn’t had in a while.
The good news is that it was all a misunderstanding: the Co-op won’t sell beer to Policemen in uniform, and the cashier and her manager misunderstood that the chap in military-style kit wasn’t actually a police SWAT-team member on a break from bashing EDL protest marchers. They’ve apologized (but there’s no indication that Sapper Walls got his beer before flying back to Af’stan).
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July 28, 2010
More on that elusive right to photography
Jon, my former virtual landlord sent me a link to this article, with more on the “you have the right only if they don’t stop you” aspect of imaginary laws and their not-so-imaginary enforcers:
Legally, it’s pretty much always okay to take photos in a public place as long as you’re not physically interfering with traffic or police operations. As Bert Krages, an attorney who specializes in photography-related legal problems and wrote Legal Handbook for Photographers, says, “The general rule is that if something is in a public place, you’re entitled to photograph it.” What’s more, though national-security laws are often invoked when quashing photographers, Krages explains that “the Patriot Act does not restrict photography; neither does the Homeland Security Act.” But this doesn’t stop people from interfering with photographers, even in settings that don’t seem much like national-security zones.
Tennessee law student Morgan Manning has compiled a list of incidents in which individuals were wrongly stopped. Cases like that of Seattle photographer Bogdan Mohora, who was arrested for taking pictures of police arresting a man and had his camera confiscated. Or NASA employee Walter Miller, who was stopped for photographing an art exhibit near the Indianapolis City-County Building and told that “homeland security” forbade photos of the facility. More recently, a CBS news crew was turned back from shooting the oil-fouled gulf coastline by two U.S. Coast Guard officers who said they were enforcing “BP’s rules.”
All of which leads people to believe that there really are laws restricting peoples’ right to take photographs or videos, because police and other government officials keep acting like there are such laws.
So what should you do if you’re taking photos and a security guard or police officer approaches you and tells you to stop? First, be polite. Security people have tough jobs and probably mean well. Ask them what legal authority they have to make you stop. (If you’re in a public place, like a street, a park, etc., they have none; if you’re in a private place, such as a shopping mall, they may have a basis for banning pictures.) Krages advises those hassled by security guards to threaten to call law enforcement. If it’s an actual police officer who’s telling you to stop shooting, ask to speak to a superior. And remember — you never have a legal duty to delete pictures you’ve taken.
More importantly, we need better education among security guards and law enforcement. In Britain, the country’s police chiefs’ association is attempting to educate officers about the rights of photographers. So far, nothing like that has happened in the U.S., but it should. Trying to block photography in public places is not only heavy-handed and wrong but, thanks to technology, basically useless. With the proliferation of cameras in just about every device we carry, digital photography has become too ubiquitous to stop. Let’s have a truce in the war on photography and set our sights on the real bad guys. Who, it seems, don’t carry cameras anyway.
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What is a “fusion center”?
Wendy McElroy thinks you should know how much domestic surveillance has increased in recent years:
The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reported on July 25 that “there are 72 fusion centers around the nation, analyzing and disseminating data and information of all kinds. That is one for every state and others for large urban cities.”
What is a fusion center?
The answer depends on your perspective. If you work for the Department of Homeland Security, it is a federal, state, local, or regional data-coordination units, designed to improve the sharing of anti-terrorism and anti-crime data in order to make America safer. If you are privacy or civil-rights advocate, it is part of a powerful new domestic surveillance infrastructure that combines data from both the public and private sectors to track innocent people and so makes Americans less safe from their own government. In that respect, the fusion center is reminiscent of the East German stasi, which used tens of thousands of state police and hundreds of thousands of informers to monitor an estimated one-third of the population.
The history of fusion centers provides insight into which answer is correct.
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July 27, 2010
Short form: he’s treating them like civilians
In the elevators of my clients’ office building, there are video displays with short news items, stock market performance, weather, and (of course) ads. The short form of this story was something like:
Top RCMP officers claim boss is verbally abusive, close-minded, arrogant and insulting
My immediate reaction was “so he’s acting like a cop dealing with a group of citizens?”
Photography is legal in Britain . . . unless they catch you at it
The continuing story of police harassment of peaceful photographers has still not come to a middle:
The Metropolitan Police Force cannot be guaranteed to abide by the law when it comes to allowing the public their right to take photographs.
That was the startling admission made last week by Met Police Commissioner John Stephenson under sharp questioning from Liberal Democrat London Assembly Member Dee Doocey during a Police Authority Meeting on 22 July in City Hall. Video footage of the exchange is available on the Metropolitan Police Authority site, with relevant footage from around the 68 minute mark.
[. . .]
He admitted that he was aware of a recent disturbing incident that took place in Romford, which according to Doocey represented “eight minutes of two of your officers intimidating somebody”.
She continued: “At one stage they say that they don’t need a law to stop them photographing, but much more worrying, they don’t need a law to take them away. It’s not a question in my view of . . . It’s so serious that it don’t think it should be somebody giving them words of advice and I don’t also agree with you that it is a question of officers using their discretion.
“This was very black and white: Two of your officers who, despite the fact that I know you have given them guidelines because I have a copy of it, who totally disregarded them and were either so completely ignorant of the law, or decided to ignore the law — they were just going to say they knew the law better than the person they were talking to — they were very seriously intimidating. I find it quite worrying that I don’t think you are taking this quite as seriously as I think you should be.”
In short, the powers-that-be have grudgingly acknowledged that photographers do indeed have the right to take photos unmolested by PC Plod, but admitted that it’s still not actually been properly communicated to Plod and the other coppers on the beat.
We asked the Met for official comment as to why, despite the numerous efforts made by Assistant Commissioner John Yates and other serving officers to get the message about photography across, such incidents kept occurring. They suggested that these incidents were a very small part of the whole story of London policing, that to expect zero incidents was unrealistic, and that when such incidents occurred, they tended to be blown up out of all proportion by the press.
An alternative explanation, suggested to us by current and recently serving police officers with whom we have spoken, is that such incidents represent a far more disturbing aspect of police culture. They suggest that a small minority of officers see the law as being “what they say it is”, and these officers are quite prepared to take their chances, on the basis that the number of times they will be caught out by being recorded is likely to be few and far between.
It’s almost as if the police are sublimating their frustrations with the out-of-control but politically favoured members of certain religious groups and instead victimizing members of the public who don’t have political favour.
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July 9, 2010
Poll numbers understate unhappiness with police over G20
Publius makes a very good point here:
The Greater Toronto Area holds a population of about 5.6 million, stretching from Burlington in the west to Oshawa in the East. The City of Toronto comprises less than half the total population, and less than one-tenth of the total land area. The summit, protests and general mayhem occurred in the downtown core, itself a small area of the City of Toronto. In the lands north of Bloor, west of Bathurst and East of the Don River, the summit meant traffic delays, not riot cops.
Travelling on the 400 series highways that weekend entailed some delays — much of the Gardiner Expressway was closed — and the most notable police presence was at highway interchanges and on / off ramps. Even for those who live in the City of Toronto itself, the vast majority saw the violence of the summit weekend on television. A large number of Torontonians had simply evacuated the City altogether, either to the suburbs to stay with relatives, or to cottage country. As a result, the images fixed in most Torontonians minds are of police cruisers burning — played again and again — and not of officers dragging middle aged men with prosthetic legs across city streets. As the stories of that weekend seep out, expect those poll numbers to change.
I was one of those who chose not to hang around in the city for the entire week leading up to the summit: I didn’t see the point in putting up with the delay and hassle. I still think it was a remarkably stupid idea to hold the G20 meetings in downtown Toronto, and that the police were handed a duff hand to play. But even given that, the police played their hand very badly.
There may or may not be a serious inquiry into the affair, but the police lost a lot of support between Friday night and Saturday night: letting the geeky nihilists get away with dramatic street theatre on national TV, then turning around and arresting innocent bystanders. It took remarkable effort to squander public support, but the police or the politicians directing the police managed to do it. Bureaucratic bipolar disorder isn’t pretty.
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June 30, 2010
The CCLA weighs in
Clive sent me an email this morning, with a link to the preliminary report from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, saying:
The fourth paragraph of the Executive summary ends with a cautionary note about the police chasing after 100-150 protester and in the process disregarding the rights of thousands.
My thought was, what do you expect. In Ontario we let the police do this ALL the time. We encourage it. We even applaud it. It is called RIDE.
This is just the next logical step.
The police demonstrated a bipolar attitude to the disturbances, with the “good cop” sitting back on Saturday and letting the nihilists get away with all sorts of property damage (including three police cruisers), while the “bad cop” showed up later on, like the punchline to a Monty Python skit, to arrest the bystanders (“Society is to blame.” “Right, we’ll arrest them instead!”).
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Questionable police tactics at the G20 protests
Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent me a link to this video, saying “My support for the police evaporates with [this] video. What the hell were the police thinking?”:
He then suggested that this is a Toronto Police Services training video:
Update: Even better than the ragged charge shown in the first video, now the police are showing off some of the “weapons” they collected during the G20, including LARP (Live Action Role Playing) gear confiscated from a gamer:
Toronto Police are on the defensive this week as they attempt to defend their heavy-handed tactics during the G20. To prove the seriousness of the threat to public security, they took police on a tour of weapons confiscated from activists.
Only there’s a problem: some of these weapons were taken from people who weren’t demonstrators. And some of them weren’t weapons — the police proudly displayed the blunt arrows and chainmail they confiscated from a live-action role-player who was taking the train to a game
If they’d found a random SCA heavy fighter to take the armour and weapons from, they might have a slightly better case: SCA heavy combat gear would be comparable to (in many cases better than) police riot gear. SCA weapons are solid rattan covered with silver duct tape to make them appear to be metal — LARP weapons are non-functional foam or other light material (similar “weapons” are called “boffers” and are used as safe toys for kids). SCA shields are fully functional as protection — LARPers generally carry lightweight shields that just look like protection but would not do much in a real confrontation.
I liked this comment to the BoingBoing post:
I remember seeing this same police press conference, only it was in Miami in 2004 during the FTAA summit. Among the items they presented as having seized from activists:
– Tire iron
– Gas can
– A map of Miami (see, they could use it to plan out their terrorist strike!)It took me a minute to realize they had just pulled all this stuff out of the trunk of some unfortunate activists’ car, where you’d totally expect to find it.
This kind of press conference is a standard component in the “new model” of protest suppression. It gives the police the hilarious task of taking a whole bunch of mostly innocuous stuff they seized and making up stories about how it could be used to maim, kill, and generally cause mass destruction.
I mean srsly – an empty water bottle could be used to fill with gasoline and throw at cops?
Bruce Schneier would be proud.
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