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UK Police Threaten Teenage Photojournalist
IonOtter writes "In what seems to be a common occurrence, and now a costly one, Metropolitan Police in the UK still don't seem to be getting the message that assaulting photographers is a bad idea. UK press photographer Jules Matteson details the event in his blog, titled The Romford Incident. The incident has already been picked up by The Register, The Independent, and the British Journal of Photography, which contains an official statement from the Metropolitan Police."
The Independent may be less, well, un-Independent than most of the mainstream rags, but no-one pays much attention to it. And The Register is read by as many people who count as the scrawlings on the average 6th Form toilet wall.
It's not to say that the laws aren't being abused. It's that pompous claims like
The Independent forced senior officers to admit that the controversial legislation is being widely misused.
are more "haha I stuck it to the Man!" exaggeration than evidence of the Met receiving a genuine reprimand from those who represent us.
This journalist will be alright. Nothing gets the government scared like a big steam of bad press (which the internet is more than willing to provide).
Now is a great time to be living. Despite all of the bad news about orwellian government in the UK, not even they can get away with harassing citizens in the age of the internet.
Yup, can't stop the signal and all that.
It's not just photographers who are at the receiving end of this absolute abomination of a law. Does anyone remember Damien Green whose house was raided by Anti-Terror police for basically selling tittle-tattle to the press?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damian_Green
Makes me sick.
Jules was dressed like this at the time.
UK Police Forward Intelligence Team where asked about not wearing ID vid :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KRgmn-n5ls
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
This is a good thing for all concerned !! He may well be a terrorist !! What would you say then ?? Hm ??
...but now's the right time to buy a nice Nikon DSLR and some decent glass on a credit card, then walk around central London taking photographs. When you get illegally stopped on trumped up charges it's just one quick trip to the lawyers and that thing's paid for itself.
The Metropolitan Police are the London police force. A quick survey of complaints against the police will show why this is unsurprising. Most British police forces are pretty good. I've lived in Herts, Cambs,Hants,Somerset, and never had the least concern about the local police force, as regards its competence or its honesty. But the Met has a reputation for corruption and violence, along with the West Midlands Police. Whether this represents the reality of policing in those areas - I wouldn't want to live in either of them - or whether large urban police forces just tend to go this way (think LA) I don't know. The Met also suffers from having a national role (which I believe to be quite wrong) and to be subject to lots of political pressure. But the motto of the Met really needs to be "quis custodiet ipsos custodes".
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The only qualification required generally to join the police is a clean criminal record, and some very basic skills, mostly physical. After that the course length is stunningly short(weeks) for a job which has a responsibility as strong as high responsibility jobs. High school qualifications are minimal, and tertiary is a waste of time, untill you have done the hard yards and learnt the chain of evidence mantra.
Lets simplify it. When push comes to shove and they are chasing a theft suspect, the ability to run, react, tackle, and subdue are at the top of the list. The police officer could not be like Richard Stallman for example. The mere presence of some intellectual brilliance, probably removes any ability to "do the grunt work".
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
It seems the UK is slowly but surely slipping away and turning into a police state. A human rights report a while ago called the UK an endemic surveillance society and the situation keeps getting worse. Unfortunately the problems around photography are not unique to the UK, I have personally been bothered in The Netherlands by security personnel on two occassions and have been asked to delete a photograph by two plainclothes policemen after taking a photo which had one of them in it. All three of these incidents happened in a public space. Under the fear mongering guises of combatting terrorism, crime and child porn and the influence of undemocratic powerful intellectual property lobies trying to protect an outdated business model from colapse our civil liberties are slowly being eroded away. I sincerely hope there will finally be a huge public backlash one of these days when people start to realize what's going on but so far most people appear to be content to let themselves be led like lambs to the slaughter.
I have just resigned from a county force after serving 4 years and this doesn't really surprise me at all. Most cops just don't know the law and certainly aren't kept abreast of developments. This isn't aimed at the officers, as there is simply no time for this. My normal working week was around 55 hours consistently working 12 hour day / late / night shifts. When on duty you are writing an hour for every hour you are out doing your job, and have around 15 fairly complex investigations ongoing at any one time... all the time being expected to respond to 999 calls... Not that we were flush for cover; at least once a month there were periods of several hours where only one or two officers covered a large suburban area of around 100,000 people, it was a wonder no-one is seriously hurt during such times.
As a result.. officers don't keep up on the law, they aren't trained in it and expected 99% of the time to generally do what they think is right and then look it up afterwards. 20 years ago there was a "spare" shift every fortnight used to learn updates to legislation and practise self defence skills; this is seen as a wasteful excess in the modern police service.
Some things never change: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO8EpfyCG2Y
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
but I think he failed the initial attitude test and they were trying to goad him into failing it even harder.
Not because of something he said, but the tone in which he said it and the fact he never let the officers get a word in edgeways.
(There is the other, orthogonal issue that nobody ever likes to admit that they're wrong - particularly not when they're in a position of authority - and as soon as something like that happens it's vanishingly unlikely to end nicely for the photographer because the only way it could end nicely is if the police officer could be persuaded to double-check that they were in the right, get told that they weren't, apologise and let the photographer go about their business, which gets less and less likely the longer it goes on because the longer it goes on, the bigger the cock-up the occifer has to admit to.)
If a police officer stops you for speeding, it is "your right" to keep a video camera trained at his faced the entire time.
It is however a conscious provocation.
He sounds hysterical in the video and has an attitude problem from the very beginning. The police demonstrate, in the face of an aggressive asshole, a supreme amount of calm and reason.
If I show up to an internal NUJ event on public property and film the faces of everyone and act similarly I would be attacked in a similar way.
5:53 - "Hey! Ah! Fuck! You pushed me down the stairs! You pushed me down the stairs! Officer, you pushed me down the stairs!". Listen to the tone of voice.
From the blog, "I spent several hours yesterday in hospital with severe and debilitating back pain from being pushed down the stairs".
This guy sounds like a fucking clown from Monthy Python's Flying Circus.
Britain has recently elected a new government, one which (on a few issues) is less authoritarian than the previous Labour government. Thirteen years of Labour led to some unwarranted laws coming into being, ranging from making it illegal to photograph a police officer - technically a video filmed by an American at a G8 summits' protests in London is illegal and should not have been shown...despite the fact it showed an officer shoving a man to the ground having not even been provoked; the assaulted man died minutes later of a heart attack.
So yeah, Labour (a right-wing party whose swing towards that direction began in the Thatcher years) brought all sorts of unpleasent socially restrictive policy, implemented gradually to the point where - ironically for those who saw it once as a permissive, left-wing outfit - they became more authoritarian than our traditiional right-wing party (Conservatives) ever have been. One of the early Labour architects, Lord Mandelson, has among the most poignent views on Internet restriction; ranging from prosecuting people with cartoons for 'possession of child porn' to much tougher sentencing for those who infringe copyright.
But to stay on topic; two things are probably most disturbing (yet predictably New Labour) about laws like forbidding photographing police is that they are justified as 'stopping terrorism'. Ridiculous as photographs of British plod are all over the Net. The other disturbing point is how easily most of the population rolls over and takes this like some apathetic whore. Two people close to me, a friend and a family member, both have no qualms with providing samples for the proposed 'DNA database' that our government pondered bringing in, and I know even more individuals with absolutely no qualms with the (now scrapped) identity cards. Want to encrypt your hard drive but get charged of a crime that requires computer access for the police? Not giving up your password can get you years in jail; and no freedom-loving geek has yet set a precedent against this.
Yes we're the most watched people in the world, yes you can be detained and not charged for weeks if suspected of 'terror offences', and yes our local governments have enthusiastically used some of New Labour's reforms to enforce their own supposed justice (think monitoring people suspected of avoiding tax or claiming welfare wrongly etc). What's worst is that much of Labour's work along these lines won't even be done away with by the imcumbent coalition; which has our most liberal major party as a component.
Why did Jules Matteson refused to show ID? So police *could* detain for futher identification? I think that provoked more drama than need be. The rigth to takes photos got with the obligation to be identified. It seams fair to me.
Police handle it bad, but Jules also provoked.
Shame on both.
The Metropolitan Police will be funding the bar bill for your first year at university. If you keep taking pictures of these... constables... then you might be able to get them to fund you all the way through to graduation.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
"antagonising the police" isn't a crime. And, since they are not a member of the public because they are a Police Officer, that "Causing alarm and distress to a member of the public" doesn't apply to him (though it DOES apply to the total prat, therefore the officer broke the law you're asserting the pratt did.
I propose to you that the police officer was the pratt and not only that abused power and position to break the law.
You just have to be able to say "KHRZHHH": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A5N3S7pMI0
FRA: STFU GTFO
This more than anything else is why the days of the True Internet are numbered - to be replaced by an electonic version of the Panopticon. I used to think the most precious commodity in the future would be potable water. I was wrong; it will be true privacy and anonymity.
He's an adolescent smartarse, though.
The "smartarse adolescent" was right - what does his age have to do with it? Unless you think kids should know their "place".
And it gives this old fart some hope that kids will be sticking up to authority when they overstep their bounds. There's nothing that pisses me off more than when the "law and order" types give cops cart blanche for their actions. Cops are to serve and protect - not walk around like they have absolute power.
Now, shut the fuck up, go back to watching your Dirty Harry movies or "24" reruns. I'm in a very cranky mood - the TV room is closed and there's a Matlock marathon on and to add insult to injury, they've ran out of banana pudding!
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Because he doesn't have to ID himself. Also, any police officer MUST by statute of law as well as conditions of service identify themselves to any member of the public. Hiding your badge makes you an undercover cop and they have to identify themselves AS a cop before they can do anything AS a cop.
How is surveillance and public control something the right wing does and not the left wing?
If you are thinking about countries that are or have in the past been left-wing, does these strike you as having the right level of surveillance, more surveillance, or less surveillance, than you would consider necessary for a good society?
The police demonstrate, in the face of an aggressive asshole, a supreme amount of calm and reason
That's funny, because every time I see video footage of such an event, it's the police who are screaming, yelling, attacking, and generally acting like exactly the aggressive asshole you describe.
All the terrorists need now is to get police uniforms now, and they can do pretty much anything they desire. Kidnap people, tell people to move out of their operation area, forbid people from taking photos of them, essentially operate unrestricted and unhindered in broad daylight in plain sight of city monitoring. And anyone who asks them questions will get "detained" into a black bag on the back of their van.
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All police are authoritarian jerks.
Yes, all not some.
Any individual police officer who has never done such a thing has ignored another officer doing so, covered up for another officer doing so, and so on. And hence is just as bad if not worse.
Here's the actual evidence
Remember when we found foreigners strange and paranoid?
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/28/international/europe/28PLAN.html?ex=1021135303&ei=1&en=2da41336db98c932
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
I am surprised that he didn't ask the police officer for identification.
Once the encounter went from the stage of being just a chat to the stage the police officer physically tries to stop you and/or tells you that you must do something and/or asks for your identification then the natural step is to ask the officer to ascertain that he is indeed a police officer (not just somebody dressed as one).
While the ID itself would be pretty damn useless (this being the UK and the Met police which never had an officer convicted of abuse of power even when do so and people die) the act of getting the officer's ID should change the dynamic of the discussion from the "Copper trying to get somebody to do what he wants" to the "Properly identified Police officer enforcing the law" which in this specific case, given that the law was in the side of the freelance photographer, would actually constraint the officer's actions.
That said, in the UK and given the anti-terrorist laws that we have in the books, the only real restriction by law that Police officers have is that at most they can only fuck-up somebody's life for 28 days by keeping them in jail without charge for that length of time.
Well, you might embarrass them, or catch them doing something they shouldn't. Since they automatically have the advantage in any "he says, she says" kind of encounter, the solution from their perspective is obvious. Many places are making it illegal to photograph or record police.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Where the government can have cameras, but you can't.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
I called them BOTH pratts. Read fail. But one is a pratt who is jailing anothert and the other one is taking pictures. I think the pratt doing the kidnapping is the bigger problem.
What happens when good quality cameras can be built into glasses?
You're very young aren't you. How can I tell?
Big deal, middle class kid with an education enjoys making the working class cop look stupid. Big man.
The police were wrong but I've no sympathy for the kid. He was intentionally confrontational and the cop hardly sounded as though he was Mr Nasty.
I for one am sick of people who think they can/should take anyone's picture simply because they have a right to. They are annoying and rude. I personally don't like someone I don't know taking my picture, even if it's in a public place and they have a right to do so. I think it's rude. It's a shame people take advantage of their "rights" under the law to be annoying assholes.
How can we stop rude and annoying public photographers? That's the more important question.
Hmmm
Unless you were at the event, you are no in position to know if the journalist was being an asshole prior to the police stopping him and questioning about his actions.
After listening to the recording, I have to say that he was not being an asshole, he was merely trying to determine under what law(s) he was being prevented from taking photographs of the parade.
Informing the police they were wrong about the law is not being an asshole, nor is it an offence.
Move your ass to a less democratic nation. If you live in the UK, you may stay there and hope it keeps going downhill. Sooner or later, you will receive a paper that will tell you the 3 things that you're allowed to do and the penalties for stepping out of line.
Until then, the price of freedom is having to put up with other people's freedoms. By the way, if I wanted to shoot your ugly mug, I could use a hidden cam and you would never know it. At least with regular cameras, you can hide away.
Oh, and you don't "take advantage" of rights. You enjoy them. Get over it, Scheisseführer.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
..."Kiss The Shiny, Shiny Boots Of Leather" is a Lou Reed song, not the State mandate for citizens confronted by the police.
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Under new UK anti-terror legislation, arguably, the police can stop you from taking pictures of them:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7888301.stm
Read the article: the official interpretation is that photographers can be asked by the police "to move on" and that this is up to the discretion of the police.
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Unfortunately the less authoritarian attitude of the coalition government has yet to percolate through to all police officers - some of them clearly think New Labour are still in power. We need to get back without delay to a position where the police have to act within the law, rather than making it up as they go along.
Pass a law REQUIRING all members of any and all police forces in the EU to wear clearly readable ID numbers on their uniforms (including undercover and plainclothes officers) when in action, and to have their basic stats and picture along with the number available on a website with full public access (undercover officers obviously excepted here). On that page should also be directions as to how to file complaints against one or more officers.
This will not in any way hamper police work or endanger individual officers, but it will make it much easier to prevent bad officers from tarnishing/trashing the reputation of the police while hiding their identity, as all the examples here clearly show to happen in many places of the so-called 'civilized' world. It should actually be a severe disciplinary offense for officers to violate rules, law and regulations in such ways as to destroy the reputation of the force, intentionally or accidentally.
As for TSA - they're the poster child for exceptionally bad authority figures. They are always rude/offensive, they are always insensitive, they are always extremely inflexible, they are always completely without humor and they obviously thrive on their power and their ability to hassle and harass everybody. It should be required by law to record (both audio and video) each and every search they do, both the normal security check and every special check (extended search or interview), and this recording must be available to anyone who wishes to file a complaint. Any TSA officers found to be rude or exceeding their mandate should be warned the first time and fired the second, no exceptions.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
The situation is bad enough as it is without false claims.
Filming or photographing a policeman is not forbidden.
What is forbidden is taking images that are likely to be used by terrorists.
The obvious (intentional?) ambiguity is most likely proof that the previous government did not know what they were doing, the Big Brotherish nature os some of these laws is astounding.
But there is no blanket ban in photographing police officers, they would need to claim you are going to use the pictures for terrorist activities, which they will not do, because that is upping up the ante quite a bit.