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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"
...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.)
He sounds hysterical in the video and has an attitude problem from the very beginning.
No, he doesn't. Unless by attitude problem you mean he informs the cops that what he's doing is legal when they claim it isn't.
The police demonstrate, in the face of an aggressive asshole, a supreme amount of calm and reason.
lol -- the police demonstrate a supreme lack of reason, actually.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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.
He may well be a terrorist !! What would you say then ?? Hm ??
I would say that the world needs many more of that sort of terrorist.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"it is however a conscious provocation" So what? Should the fact that it is a conscious provocation alter the police officer's behaviour in any way? also, note that speeding is a criminal offence. taking pictures of a public parade is not.
"an internal NUJ event on public property". wtf? what kind of "internal" event would take place on "public property"?? and what has that analogy got to do with filming a *public event* on public property and then subsequently filming *public servants* going about their *public duties*??
these copper twunts were irritated because this guy wouldn't do what they asked him to. but he wouldn't do what they asked him to, because he was *doing nothing wrong*.
"he sounds hysterical in the video" Of course he does! He's a 16-year old kid and these big burly twats keep on grabbing him and his camera for no reason other than that they've decided they don't want him to do what he's perfectly entitled to do.
hint: just because they wear a uniform doesn't make them automatically right.
"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.
I'd say that any terrorist that plans his act of terrorism by filming in a public street and attracting huge attention is probably an idiot. Are they not able to use, say, maps, local knowledge, a quick stroll down the road in question and/or their brain to "plan" something "terrorist-y"?
Terrorists tend, on the whole, not to be very bright. That's why the "shocking" terrorist acts are things like - smuggling a weapon on board an international flight with valid ID, driving a gas-laden car into an airport security barrier, pulling a bomb out of your rucksack on the bus and detonating it, putting a bomb under someone's car, etc.
Thank God we don't have any smart terrorists... the kind who would, say, cause a security alert at an airport in order to have it evacuated and then set off the car-bomb parked outside (away from all the security, checks, police officers with guns, etc.), in the open-air, right where 10,000 people just got evacuated to. Or fly the damn planes themselves and possibly hit something actually critical instead of a block of offices. A single dedicated, smart, evil person could do a damn sight more damage that all the "terrorist" acts put together. Fortunately, they are few and far between.
Terrorist are stroppy teenagers with knives - attention-seeking idiots who don't quite grasp that killing innocent people doesn't get you any closer to having other people see your side of the argument. Unfortunately, the biggest terrorists tend to be large, first-world governments, and they still act in the same way.
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.
I don't care if he was talking in a miss piggy voice, he was R I G H T. When, legally, you are in the right, there's nothing else to say. The police here had no purpose or right to do what they did. In fact, detaining this guy was taking them away from policing the crowd. They were actively making the march more dangerous by their absence.
Judging someone by the tone or pitch of their voice is idiotic. It is the content that matters.
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.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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
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.
Hmmm
It is not conscious provocation, it is merely recording the events as and when they happen. I found it interesting that the spokesperson for the Met Police questioned why the journalist had recorded the incident.
The reason for recording said events is that without some form of recording, or without extensive independent witness corroboration, the courts almost always side with the police's version of what happened. regardless of how absurd the police version is.
In this instance we quite clearly hear the Police Officers inventing a series of criminal offences to justify their actions. Without the recording, it would be the police officers word against that of the journalist, he would have been arrested and no doubt charged and finally convicted for a public order offence, despite not actually committing any crime.
It seems there are way too many apologists for the police that are willing to excuse any and almost every action they do.