“Google Inc. has turned down the demands of US law enforcement agencies to remove video files showing police brutality from video-sharing website, YouTube.”
For full story, see:
Entries Tagged 'Recording police' ↓
YouTube keeps police brutality videos
October 30th, 2011 — Excessive Force, Occupy, Recording police, Rights
Unidentified Berkeley Police at Occupy Oakland
October 30th, 2011 — News From the Streets, Occupy, Recording police, Rights
Berkeley Copwatch points out the Penal Code to officers at Occupy Oakland, and raises some questions:
Free Fly Benzo! Criminalizing critique, cameras and community in Bayview Hunters Point
October 26th, 2011 — Excessive Force, Racism, Recording police, Rights
DeBray Carpenter aka Fly Benzo and his brother, Tommy Clayton aka Pladee, are being choked yet again by the San Francisco INjustice system. His third arrest since he began leading the protest against the police murder of Kenneth Harding was Tuesday, Oct. 18, probably to silence him on Saturday, Oct. 22, the National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality. Pack the courtroom for Fly’s next hearing on Thursday, Oct. 27, 9 a.m., 850 Bryant in Dept. 12.
For more information, including on ways to contribute, see SF BayView Newspaper
FREE FLY BENZO – ALL OUT TO SUPPORT FLY BENZO
October 21st, 2011 — Excessive Force, Racism, Recording police, Rights
From the Oscar Grant Committee:
Monday at 9:00 a.m., Department 12 at San Francisco hall of (in)justice
850 Bryant
check out the SF Bayview piece: sfbayview.com/2011/threats-or-payback/
On Tuesday afternoon one day after DeBray Carpenter who is known as Fly Benzo, a resident, activist and hip-hop artist in Bayview/Hunters Point spoke at a well attended press conference in preparation of the October 22 Day Against Police Brutality, he was talking about Yes on Prop H (school placement/desegregation proposition) when San Francisco cops started filming him, and then he started filming them filming him. The cops tried to take his camera; Fly tries to defend his camera. The police start attacking Fly, Tommy, his older brother, goes in to defend Fly, one officer fell while trying to do a ridiculous take down and he hit his head.
Both Tommy and Fly were beat up and went to the hospital before they were taken to jail. Tommy was ORd but charged with resisting arrest and battery.
Fly was charged with resisting, battery and attempting to incite a riot. The arraignment has been put over to Monday at 9:00 a.m., Department 12 at San Francisco hall of (in)justice, 850 Bryant.
Who is Fly Benzo? According to Jeremy Miller, executive director of the Idriss Stelly Foundation, “Fly is a young, articulate, charismatic man from a radical family. As a young organizer who is on the rise, I feel that the SFPD is trying to clip his wings.”
It should be noted that after SFPD chief of police Suhr got booed out of the Bayview Opera house meeting after the police killed Kenneth Harding, Fly Benzo was illegaly arrested for disrupting that meeting. He and his family have been targeted and retaliated against for standing up and speaking out against police brutality. And now he’s been arrested and assaulted for copwatching.
The Oscar Grant Committee stands in solidarity with Fly Benzo and demands all charges be dropped against him and his brother Tommy.
As NYPD Probes Footage of Police Brutality, Recording the Cops Still a Felony in Illinois
September 30th, 2011 — Excessive Force, Recording police, Rights
By Rania Khalek | Sourced from AlterNet
Posted at September 29, 2011, 2:36 pm
People around the country are rightly outraged at NYPD Deputy InspectorAnthony Bologna after multiple recordings of him indiscriminately pepper-spraying unarmed Occupy Wall Street protesters surfaced. If not for those recordings, Bologna would likely have never been identified and held accountable for his ruthless behavior.
Meanwhile, in the state of Illinois residents are regularly arrested for recording on-duty police in public, regardless of the circumstances, thanks to a draconian eavesdropping law, which I wrote about extensively here.
Illinois is one of a handful of all-party consent states, where it is illegal to record a conversation unless everyone involved has given permission to do so. But the law is most restrictive in Illinois, where it is a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison to record on-duty police officers.
Earlier this week, ABC News reported on the case of Louis Frobe, who spent a night in jail and faced 15 years in prison last August after using his flip camera to record a traffic stop. Frobe was pulled over for speeding and the officer was not pleased when he realized he was being recorded, even as his squad dash cam was routinely recording the traffic stop as well. ABC News details the confrontation:
Officer: “That recording? Frobe : “Yes, Yes, I’ve been… Officer: “Was it recording all of our conversation? Frobe: “Yes. Officer: “Guess what? You were eavesdropping on our conversation. I did not give you permission to do so. Step out of the vehicle.”
Louis Frobe was then cuffed and arrested for felony eavesdropping.
“I was terrified. I was absolutely terrified. I was begging him, I said I didn’t know about this law. Would you please take the camera – this is no big deal – and smash it. You know I didn’t know about the law,” Frobe told ABC7.
The charges were ultimately dropped, as usually is the case. But after experiencing the worst night of his life and spending a night in Lake County Jail, Frobe was too angry to let it go. So he got a lawyer and filed a lawsuit to challenge the constitutionality of the law.
It is widely recognized across the country that recording in public, where there is no expectation of privacy is guaranteed by the First Amendment, which is why the ACLU of Illinois is currently challenging the law. Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit, who is on the panel hearing the case, was quoted by the Chicago Sun-Times as saying the following:
A senior appeals court judge said Tuesday that if Illinois’ eavesdropping law were expanded, gang bangers and “snooping” reporters would run rampant, secretly recording conversations unchecked.
“If you permit the audio recordings, they’ll be a lot more eavesdropping. … There’s going to be a lot of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers,” U.S. 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner said. “Yes, it’s a bad thing. There is such a thing as privacy.”
Given the brutality being dished out at peaceful protesters in Zuccotti Park, Judge Posner is clearly on the side of officers like Bologna and those who prefer to shield authority figures from any degree of accountability.
While the panel is set to issue a written ruling in the coming months, the Occupy Wall Street movement has spread to Illinois. Thus far, exchanges between the Occupy Chicago protesters and Chicago police have remained civil. But should they take a turn for the worse, let’s hope that protesters armed with smartphones can record footage of the chaos without having to spend a night in jail or face 15 years in prison.
SF blocked cell phones to disrupt protest of shooting by transit cops
September 18th, 2011 — BART Police, Racism, Recording police
By PAUL ELIAS – Associated Press | Aug. 12, 2011
news.yahoo.com/cellphones-blocked-sf-hinder-transit-protest-041114962.html
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) Transit officials said Friday that they blocked cellphone reception in San Francisco train stations for three hours to disrupt planned demonstrations over a police shooting.
Officials with the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, better known as BART, said they turned off electricity to cellular towers in four stations from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday. The move was made after BART learned that protesters planned to use mobile devices to coordinate a demonstration on train platforms.
“A civil disturbance during commute times at busy downtown San Francisco stations could lead to platform overcrowding and unsafe conditions for BART customers, employees and demonstrators,” BART officials said in a prepared statement.
The statement noted that it’s illegal to demonstrate on the platform or aboard the trains. BART said it has set aside special areas for demonstrations.
The American Civil Liberties Union questioned the tactic.
“Shutting down access to mobile phones is the wrong response to political protests,” the ACLU’s Rebecca Farmer said in a blog post.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation said on its website that “BART officials are showing themselves to be of a mind with the former president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak.” Mubarak’s regime cut Internet and cellphone services in the country for days early this year while trying to squelch protests demanding an end to his authoritarian rule.
BART officials were confident the cellphone disruptions were legal. The demonstration planned Thursday failed to develop.
“We had a commute that was safe and without disruption,” said BART spokesman Jim Allison.
The demonstrators were protesting the July 3 shooting of Charles Blair Hill by BART police who claimed Hill came at them with a knife.
A July 11 demonstration disrupted service during the rush-hour commute, prompting the closing of BART’s Civic Center station. Several arrests were made.
Police sued over deleted videos of confrontation
September 18th, 2011 — Recording police, Rights
Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2011
By SARAH BRUMFIELD – Associated Press
www.fresnobee.com/2011/08/31/2519790/police-sued-over-deleted-videos.html
BALTIMORE — Baltimore police officers deleted videos from a man’s mobile phone after he recorded a confrontation between officers and a female friend at the 2010 Preakness Stakes, violating his constitutional rights and wiping away a year and a half of memories of his young son, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday. The suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland challenges the detention of Christopher Sharp, the seizure of his phone and the deletion of the recordings as unconstitutional. The ACLU argued that law enforcement officers in Maryland, including Baltimore police officers, “routinely threaten to arrest or punish civilians who document police activity, using the Maryland Wiretap Act and related, inapplicable infractions to back up these threats.”
Federal Court Says You Can Record the Cops
September 18th, 2011 — Recording police, Rights
by Sam Biddle
August 30, 2011
Remember that nutcase cop who arrested a bystander for recording a public crime scene? Yeah, that was a violation of the First Amendment, according to the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston. This is great news.
The ruling originates with a suit filed by Boston attorney Simon Glik, who was arrested for recording another arrest in the middle of the Boston Common. You know, the enormous, oldest public park in America. A pretty public place.
The cops had cuffed Glik and taken his phone on the basis that his recording was “secret”—a violation of state wiretapping laws. This should be patently ridiculous, but it worked at the time. Until the feds stepped in. The Harvard-affiliated Citizen Media Law Project cuts right to the juiciest, most First Amendmentlicious excerpts from the court’s ruling:
“[I]s there a constitutionally protected right to videotape police carrying out their duties in public? Basic First Amendment principles, along with case law from this and other circuits, answer that question unambiguously in the affirmative.”
“Glik filmed the defendant police officers in the Boston Common, the oldest city park in the United States and the apotheosis of a public forum. In such traditional public spaces, the rights of the state to limit the exercise of First Amendment activity are ‘sharply circumscribed.’”
“[A] citizen’s right to film government officials, including law enforcement officers, in the discharge of their duties in a public space is a basic, vital, and well-established liberty safeguarded by the First Amendment.”
“Gathering information about government officials in a form that can readily be disseminated to others serves a cardinal First Amendment interest in protecting and promoting ‘the free discussion of governmental affairs.’”
In other words, the cops were out of line, and filming them with your phone is not only fair game, but strong a constitutional power of the citizenry. Although this is a district ruling, and it’d take the Supreme Court to make okayed cop-filming the law of the land, this is a terrific victory for the free use of technology, transparent society, and sanity.
gizmodo.com/5835723/federal-court-says-you-can-record-the-cops
Victory in Jeremy Marks case: People’s movement keeps Marks out of jail as case concludes
May 1st, 2011 — Racism, Recording police, Rights
“Videotaping police misconduct is not a crime, it’s self defense!”
APRIL 30, 2011
See the statement by the Jeremy Marks Defense Committee in Liberation Newspaper:
www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/news/victory-in-jeremy-marks-case.html
Poisonous fruit: Jeff Adachi on the right to housing without police harassment
April 16th, 2011 — Recording police, Rights, San Francisco PD
From Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia at POOR Magazine, from April 8th article in the SF BayView newspaper:
“They (police) are saying its only eight bad cops, but that makes me wonder how many more times this has happened to folks. And the only reason these cops were seen is because they were caught on video,” Jeff said. He related experiences in courtrooms where judges have apologized to police officers when presented with evidence like this, telling them, “I’m sorry I have to dismiss this case.”
sfbayview.com/2011/poisonous-fruit-jeff-adachi-on-the-right-to-housing-without-police-harassment/