Cops Don't Like To Be Video Taped While IN The Act of Abusing The Power

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/10/battle-between-cops-cameras_n_795295.html
Battle Heats Up Between Police Officers And Civilians Who Record Them

Should ordinary people be arrested for filming on-duty police abusing their power? If a string of recent cases is any indication, judicial systems throughout the country think so.

LA Weekly reported Thursday on the troubling case of Jeremy Marks, a teenager who's been in jail since May for using his cell phone camera to videotape an L.A. Unified School District officer slamming a student into the window of a school bus. His working-class parents can't afford to pay the $155,000 bail to bring their son home for Christmas, so Marks may be forced to plead guilty to "attempted lynching" in order to reduce his sentence from seven years to 32 months.

Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley, who recently lost a hotly-contested race for California Attorney General, continues to pursue charges against Marks, despite taped evidence that he stayed largely on the sidelines of the skirmish, quietly capturing the ordeal on video.

Meanwhile, Reason.com published a story this week detailing a similar account in Illinois. After what he describes as repeated harassment by local police claiming he violated the town's "eyesore law" by working on used cars in his own yard, backyard mechanic Michael Allison began tape-recording such encounters. When he finally received a formal citation, the judge denied his request for a reporter during his hearing, prompting him to bring his own tape recorder to court.

The judge then charged him with five counts of violating Illinois' wiretapping law by recording his previous interactions without the officers' consent. He faces up to 75 years in prison.

This past summer, Gizmodo ran a piece discussing laws on the books in at least three states that are being newly-interpreted to prevent civilians from recording the actions of on-duty officers in response to a flurry of viral videos capturing police abuse. The problem is, most of the charges have developed around wiretapping statutes written long before technological innovations like smartphones and social networks emerged, facilitating a heightened level of transparency.

In fact, many lawyers have deemed it "absurd" or "utter nonsense" to use antiquated wiretapping laws to bring charges against bystanders who record cops in action. And First Amendment enthusiasts are fighting back -- Carlos Miller's Photography Is Not A Crime tracks these types of cases on a daily basis.

BP Media Clampdown: No Photos Of Dead Animals, Please

When we last left Mother Jones' reporter Mac McClelland,

 she was in the Gulf Coast region, caught up in the surreal tangle of media roadblocks that were being erected by British Petroleum to keep reporters at bay. How have things done since then? Not well, as it turns out!

Indeed, when I ran into some [cleanup workers] packing up on the Grand Isle beach twenty minutes later, I asked them only if they were done working for the day, and they refused to tell me. One woman said, "I can't talk to you," and then another worker ran up to her and grabbed her arm and said, "Just ignore her, ignore her," and the whole interaction was unsettlingly rude and sort of sad. The workers who were staying next to me in my Grand Isle motel last week told me that when BP (not, in this case, and for the record, a subcontractor) had instructed them that they couldn't talk to the press, it'd involved a warning that media organizations would go so far as to dub audio propaganda over their videotaped commentary, putting unflattering words in their mouths.

The New York Daily News' Matthew Lysiak is also in Grand Isle, where he was the fortunate beneficiary of a "surreptitious tour of the wildlife disaster unfolding in Louisiana."

"There is a lot of coverup for BP. They specifically informed us that they don't want these pictures of the dead animals. They know the ocean will wipe away most of the evidence. It's important to me that people know the truth about what's going on here," the contractor said. "The things I've seen: They just aren't right. All the life out here is just full of oil. I'm going to show you what BP never showed the President."

A dead dolphin, stuffed with oil, figures prominently in the account. It's all very sad, and not a little bit enraging. As Allison KilKenny puts it: "In a sane world, a company guilty of gross negligence that resulted in the deaths of 11 workers would be under criminal investigation, and not be parading around the coast, telling the media where they can go and who they can talk to, while forbidding their clean-up crews from wearing protective gear."
Meanwhile, remember BP CEO Tony Hayward, who this past Sunday said that we "wanted his life back?" Well, he's very sorry about how that must have sounded, to humans:

"I made a hurtful and thoughtless comment on Sunday when I said that "I wanted my life back." When I read that recently, I was appalled. I apologize, especially to the families of the 11 men who lost their lives in this tragic accident. Those words don't represent how I feel about this tragedy, and certainly don't represent the hearts of the people of BP - many of whom live and work in the Gulf - who are doing everything they can to make things right. My first priority is doing all we can to restore the lives of the people of the Gulf region and their families - to restore their lives, not mine."

Naturally, that bit of flackery was emailed to reporters and posted on the BP America Facebook page, in keeping with BP's tradition of keeping anything too troubling as far away from cameras as possible.
RELATED:
"Ignore Her": The BP Press Lockdown Continues [Mother Jones]
Dying, dead marine wildlife paint dark, morbid picture of Gulf Coast following oil spill [New York Daily News]
BP tells cleanup workers no photos of dead, oil-covered marine life [Allison Kilkenny: Unreported]

BP Better At Stemming Journalists Than Oil Wells