Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
I explained a bit more about the change of government here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1702892&cid=32742270
It's simply not the case that the UK is seeing civil liberties eroded more since the change of government last month, already we've had firm action to reverse some of the policies of the previous government, and we've promises of much more to come- if even some of them are followed it puts the UK in a much better state.
I'm not naive enough to believe things will be perfect, but currently the situation in the UK is certainly that civil liberties situation in general is actually improving from where it was, not getting worse, for now at least.
Uh, no.
Failure to comply with a lawful order is only applicable in situations where the police legally can make you do something, it doesn't give the police any authority to order things in the first place.
Police can require people to do things in a few, specific circumstances. The main ones:
When the person is breaking the law, they can order them to stop (obviously).
They can demand people identify themselves.
Both those are covered under the specific laws, though. Failure to comply with a lawful order is complicated, but here are some examples where it can be used:
Refusing to allow yourself to be arrested via passive resistance. Aka, refusing to hold out your hands to be handcuffed, or to come out of a locked car. (This is not resisting arrest, which requires violence on your part. And this is where the whole concept of locking yourself to things and not having the key came from...the police can't charge you for failure to obey orders you cannot physically obey.)
When there are breaches of the peace, even if that specific person is not committing a criminal act (Aka, ordering a crowd that is unpeacable assembled to disperse. If they do not, they can start arresting random people for that.)
Likewise, if there's been a fight, the police officer can order the two participates to stay away from each other, or even for one of them to leave.
When they have a reasonable suspicion of someone's behavior including lawbreaking, but do not have enough evidence to, or just do not feel like, arresting them. Aka, someone keeps looking inside the car window of a car they admit don't own, and the police officer believes they are going to steal it or break into it....he can order them to leave that car the hell alone.
But they cannot just randomly give orders and demand they be followed. There has to a legally justified reason for the order. And something like 90% of 'Failure to comply with a lawful order' is probably an additional charge to other lawbreaking when the person wouldn't stop breaking the law, like someone who was trespassing and refused to leave even after the police ordered him to.Or, as is listed above, 'loitering'. This is exactly how loitering laws are designed to be used...not to wander up and charge with, but, for the police to have the ability, when they see suspicious behavior, to make the people stop. The police see you loitering, tell you to leave, you don't, they arrest you for refusing to do something they can lawfully do.
This does not mean, of course, that the law is not abused, or even that it's a good idea. But it doesn't let them order whatever they want.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?