Photography is Not a Crime

By Carlos Miller
The Pacific Island of Guam is listed as a U.S. territory, meaning its people are U.S. citizens, spend American dollars and even consider the American president as its head of state.

However, the U.S. Constitution does not apply there apparently.

According to a story posted on First Amendment Center:

In October 2009, two Guam police officers ordered James L. Adkins out of his car after they noticed he was taking cell-phone pictures of an accident on a public street in Tamuning, Guam, a U.S. territory. The officers stopped Adkins’ car and told him he could not take pictures.

Adkins allegedly responded that “there is nothing wrong with taking pictures.” The officers then ordered him to turn over the phone. After he refused, they handcuffed him and took him to the Hagatna police station where he was booked, fingerprinted and photographed. They took his cell phone and never returned it.

Releasing Adkins after four hours, police gave him a notice to appear in court on two charges: “obstructing governmental function” and “failure to comply.” The first law says a person commits a misdemeanor if he or she “intentionally obstructs, impairs or perverts the administration of law or other governmental function by force.” The second law says, “It shall be unlawful for the operator of any motor vehicle to refuse to comply with any lawful order … of a peace officer who shall be in uniform and shall exhibit his badge or other sign of authority.”

Adkins filed a lawsuit in federal court, alleging 11 different causes of action against the two officers and other defendants. One of those claims was that the officers infringed on his First Amendment rights by prohibiting him from taking pictures on public property.

The judge, a U.S. District Court Judge nonetheless, ruled that citizens do not have a First Amendment right to take photographs on a public highway.

Judge Frances M. Tydingco-Gatewood referred to a case last year in which a federal judge ruled that an Oakland Tribune photojournalist did not have the right to stop his car on a public highway and snap photos of an accident.

However, the judge acknowledged that there have been other cases throughout the country where judges have ruled that photographers do have the right to take pictures on public highways.

But those cases were not in the 9th Circuit, she said, which includes the western states as well as Guam. So obviously the Constitution does not stretch from sea to shining sea.

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By Carlos Miller
A cop who writes a regular column for a law enforcement website came out strongly against officers who arrest citizens for videotaping them.

The cop, who only goes by Bullethead in a website called Law Officer, invoked the Constitution as he stated the following:

Today one of my many spies sent me an article about cops arresting people for videotaping them while on duty and in public. This particular spy didn’t think the cops should arrest for that. He was exactly right.

I could write volumes on why this is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard, but I’ll just touch on the high points. We’re public servants entrusted with awesome power. We have the power to use force, even lethal force. We have the power to take away freedom. We’re allowed to kick down doors in the middle of the night and rush into people’s homes with machine guns. Maybe you non-thinkers don’t realize that all of these things, although necessary when used correctly, are also the things we’ve fought to defend against in every war we’ve ever fought. Don’t think so? Go study some history. You’ll find we were either protecting ourselves or someone else from the very things that police are allowed and expected to do when crooks cross the lines drawn by our society.

When we swear to uphold the Constitution, it’s the whole thing, not just the parts we like. Any cop who whines about the Bill of Rights standing in the way of making arrests should have their door kicked in by masked officers in the middle of the night. How would they like to get beaten until they confess to something? Or jailed without a fair trial? That’s right boys and girls, Ol’ Bullethead just hit a bunch of them—4th, 5th, 6th, 8th and the 14th amendments for good measure. My point: We must operate from within these laws. When we do, why wouldn’t we want it on video?

I wonder if the morons abusing their own laws against wiretapping have thought about dash cams and belt recorders. Maybe they don’t have those in the three states currently going after people for recording the cops (i.e., Maryland, Illinois and Massachusetts), but I’ll bet they do. They’ll say its OK because they’re conducting a criminal investigation. Fair enough, but what about consensual encounters? Oops—didn’t think about that, did you? A consensual encounter isn’t a criminal investigation until we have enough reasonable suspicion to detain someone. If you’re a cop in one of those three states, you’d better not activate your recorder until you have a detention or you might just have to arrest yourself and get a hook that way. Those doing this are claiming both parties must consent or the video and audio is illegal.

And if that doesn’t blow your socks off, a total of four commenters who are apparently officers, agreed with him.

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By Carlos Miller
North Carolina Judge Beth Dixon appeared to be cruising for a reelection to a third term come this November.

But that was before the Rowan County District Court judge wiped her ass with the Constitution last month by convicting a woman for videotaping police officers from her front porch.

That caused the woman who has spent the last six years having full control of her courtroom to lose complete control of her Reelect Judge Beth Dixon Facebook page.

An onslaught of criticism on that page, much of it from Photography is Not a Crime readers, forced her to delete the page entirely on Tuesday.

At first she tried to keep up with the comments by deleting them every few hours. Then she tried to disable comments to her wall.

But that still allowed comments on her previous posts.

Finally, she just deleted the page altogether – exactly 24 hours after I launched the Defeat Beth Dixon on Rowan County District Court Judge Facebook page – and 11 days after she convicted Felicia Gibson for resisting arrest.

Why did she feel she have enough evidence to convict Gibson? According to the Salisbury Post:

Dixon found Gibson had interfered with the officer’s ability to do his job as he dealt with a traffic stop.

In other words, Dixon believed Gibson was preventing the officer from doing his job by videotaping him from her front porch.

Dixon had about 350 followers when she deleted her Facebook page, but many of those were PINAC readers who were forced to like the page before they could comment. She probably had about 315 genuine followers before the onslaught began.

Meanwhile, her opponent, Douglas A. Smith, has 224 followers on his Facebook page as of this writing. Smith has yet to comment on the Gibson case even though he is being urged to do so on his Facebook page.

My Defeat Beth Dixon Facebook page has 269 followers as of this writing.

For a few extra dollars, not sure how much right now, I can turn the Defeat Beth Dixon page into a Facebook ad targeting readers in Salisbury. It would come up on the right column of their own Facebook page, which might work on a subconscious level by the time they step into the booth, considering most voters don’t have a clue about the judges they are voting on anyway.

If I can raise some donations through my Legal Defense Fund, I’ll start putting the ads up.

Dixon still has a website outside of Facebook. Here is her opponent’s website.

To get an idea of what type of comments were left on her Facebook page before she deleted it, check out the screen grabs below. Click to enlarge. [Read more →]

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By Carlos Miller
From my experience, every time a police officer turns on his fellow officers to report abuse, he becomes ostracized and eventually forced out of the department.

Hopefully that won’t happen to Miami-Dade Police Officer Frank Adams, who sat with the Miami New Times and described how his fellow officers routinely abuse and falsely arrest citizens.

Adams, a 15-year veteran, deserves to be commended for his righteousness and bravery for speaking out.

Miami-Dade Police officer Frank Adams calls it the “Rodney King beatdown.” When the burly, soft-spoken 15-year department veteran watched four fellow cops kick, choke, and punch an unarmed subject eight years ago, he says, it was every bit as vicious as the infamous Los Angeles incident. The only difference: There wasn’t a video camera to catch it.

“I thought he was dead,” Adams says of 42-year-old Henry Lee Gaines, who was arrested around 4 a.m. September 22, 2002, in front of his tiny banana-colored Brownsville home. “I saw him go into convulsions and thought, Oh my God, they killed this guy.”

But what really floored Adams is the way Officer Gregorio Perez, who wrote the report, spun the incident. Five-foot-nine-inch Gaines was described as an incredibly powerful aggressor. He had allegedly lifted one officer onto his shoulder, climbed a set of stairs, and hurled the cop to the ground. He had supposedly even grabbed Adams by the shirt and repeatedly punched him, knocking him to the ground and injuring his hand.

It’s a lie, Adams says. He claims Gaines never resisted: The hand injury had occurred when another cop knocked Adams over while trying to kick Gaines. No criminal charges have been filed, but the claim was validated last month by the department’s Professional Compliance Bureau (PCB).

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By Carlos Miller
A college student who was videotaping the aftermath of an altercation between another student and a police officer was arrested on questionable charges.

Nicholas Nigro, a student at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York, was charged with disorderly conduct and having an open container. He denied having an open container, according to the Times Union.

And it is not clear what constituted disorderly conduct because while the above video is not very clear, it is obvious that Nigro was not interfering nor yelling nor doing anything other than describing the incident that had just taken place between the officer and the student.

“His face is all bloodied up. When I came out they were hitting him with nightsticks,” Nigro narrates into the camera.

Seconds later, an officer storms up to him and orders him to get back inside his home. It doesn’t appear as if the cop even gave Nigro a chance to comply because the camera is then turned off and he is presumably arrested.

It is likely that Troy police were trying to clear the area of any evidence after having beaten a man senseless.

”He was down on the ground and they were taking turns hitting him three times in the back of the head,” Nigro said. ”One of the officers also bare-fisted punched him in the face and people were yelling at them to stop.”

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Judge Beth Dixon has no business wearing the robe

By Carlos Miller
Normally I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about a local election in North Carolina, but now I want to do anything I can to make sure Judge Beth Dixon loses her reelection bid for Rowan County District Court Judge come this November.

Dixon, who has served as District Court Judge since 2002, last week convicted a woman named Felicia Gibson for resisting arrest for refusing to go back inside her house as she stood on her front porch videotaping police making a traffic stop.

Salisbury Police Officer Mark Hunter actually arrested her inside her home in November 2009, which is reminiscent of the Texas case where a cop followed a man inside his home and arrested him for “illegal photography” as well as the recent case of Arkansas cops arresting a man who stood on his property and called the cops Nazis as they were making an arrest.

But charges in both those cases were dropped by the time they got to court as they should have been in this case.

Dixon obviously has no respect for the Constitution, especially the First and Fourth Amendments.

The conviction stirred a protest as well as an editorial in the local newspaper, questioning how can someone be arrested for resisting arrest for documenting police from their own property?

The resisting-arrest conviction last week of Felicia Gibson has left a lot of people wondering. Can a person be charged with resisting arrest while observing a traffic stop from his or her own front porch?

Salisbury Police Officer Mark Hunter thought so, and last week District Court Judge Beth Dixon agreed. Because Gibson did not at first comply when the officer told her and others to go inside, the judge found Gibson guilty of resisting, delaying or obstructing an officer.

Gibson was not the only bystander watching the action on the street. She was the only one holding up a cell-phone video camera

As a guy who’s been arrested twice for resisting arrest for photographing cops, including one where I was convicted because of improper evidence allowed by a biased judge, this case really aggravates me. Documenting police against their wishes is not resisting arrest.

Obviously, the cops will use that charge against people because there is no law in the books that specifically forbid the recording of police in public.

But it’s up to the judges to keep the laws straight, which is where Dixon failed.

That is why she must not be reelected this November.

Feel free to share your feelings with her on her Facebook page as others have been doing. You’ll have to “like” the page first. Let’s see how long those comments last. She is running against a guy named Douglas Smith.

Editor’s note: As of Monday morning, Dixon has deleted several comments on her Facebook page, so I took the liberty of creating a Defeat Beth Dixon on Rowan County District Court Judge Facebook page.

Gibson plans to appeal the case and I have no doubts she will have her conviction overturned as I did in my appeal.

Below is the video that Gibson recorded the night of her arrest. It’s really hard to make out any details.

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By Carlos Miller
Joey Boots, the man behind the viral video of the Times Square ballerina that led to a confrontation with a vigilante bicyclist, wants to make one thing clear.

Joey Boots

He is not a pervert.

“Well I’m not a pervert for that girl,” he said during a phone interview with Photography is Not a Crime Sunday afternoon.

“I’m gay, dude.”

Boots, who is a regular on the Howard Stern Show, has been building a collection of Youtube videos from around New York City over the last few months with his Flip camera.

He figured a video of a sexy girl in tight shorts spreading her legs in a ballerina pose in the middle of Times Square would probably get some attention. And he’s right, although it took a few months for it to go viral since he posted it in May.

The video ended up driving more than a 100,000 readers to PINAC yesterday where we ended up with a record 124,175 page views. The previous record was around 55,000. Gizmodo, Gawker, Gothamist and Fark all linked to PINAC with the video.

So now the question on everybody’s mind is, what in the hell is a goober?

“That’s from the Andy Griffith Show,” he said. “Goober was this real slow southerner on the show.”

“I call all stupid southerners Goobers.”

At one point that is not evident in the video, Boots knocked the man and his bicycle down.

“He was pushing against me and his bike was on my foot, so I pushed him back and he fell to the ground,” Boots said.

Boots stands at 6’1″ and weights 320 pounds. The cyclist was about 5’10″ and weighed about 160 pounds, Boots said.

The cyclist was not part of the group doing the photo shoot but standing to the side watching the shoot, probably getting his own thrills, when he decided to become a hero.

After the group walked away, they reported Boots to a police officer who ended up informing the group that Boots had the right to videotape in public.

“I had to show the cop my video,” he said.

Boots, who was born in the Bronx and raised in Long Island, has had several other confrontations with people over his public videography. He keeps his viewers updated on his Facebook page.

One of his videos, he won’t say which one, was chosen for Ridley Scott’s Life in a Day project, which will premiere at next year’s Sundance Film Festival in January 2011.

Above and below are a few videos where he gets confronted by people who believe it is illegal to videotape people in public. The above one is especially funny and infuriating because the woman is so goddamn annoying.

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By Carlos Miller
So this hot chick is spreading her legs in a ballerina pose in the middle of busy Manhattan for some type of photo shoot when a random guy walks up and starts videotaping her ass.

This prompts some of her friends to berate the guy for being a pervert, even though they were essentially doing the same thing, except with still cameras.

The action starts a little after the 2:50 mark. Within a minute, some wanker with a bicycle gets into the shot and starts shoving the videographer.

They exchange words in typical New York fashion with neither of them backing down.

The videographer gets the last word in by continually calling the cyclist a “goober.”

The model and her entourage end up walking away from the photo shoot while the videographer informs them that he had the right to videotape in public.

My question is, how did they manage to conduct such a photo shoot, with assistants, props and reflectors, without getting harassed by the NYPD?

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By Carlos Miller
The Homeland Security Bureau of the Miami-Dade Police Department has published a “Terrorist Awareness Guide” where it advises citizens to be on the lookout for people taking “inappropriate photographs or videos.”

And no, they are not talking about perverts shooting up the skirts of women.

They’re talking about people taking photographs of surveillance cameras and other things that are plainly visible to the naked eye.

Here is an excerpt of what the pamphlet says:

Maybe you are at a National Monument and you
notice a person nearby taking a lot of photos. Not
unusual. But then you notice that he is only taking
photos of t he surveillance cameras, crash barriers at
the entrances, and access control procedures. Is that
normal for a tourist? Absolute not!

The following should cause a heightened sense of
concern:

•       Unusual interest
•       Surveillance
•       Inappropriate photographs or videos
•       Note-taking
•       Drawing of diagrams
•       Annotating maps
•       Using binoculars or night vision devices

It should be noted that Detective Bustamante of the same homeland security bureau was one of the officers who responded to our first Metrorail incident where we were “permanently banned” for taking photos.

Bustamante proved pretty clueless of the law when he informed us we needed a permit to photograph anything within the Metrorail, regardless if we were shooting commercial or not.

Read the entire document below. The portion on photography is on the second page in the right-hand column circled in red.

Terrorist Awareness Guide MDPD PINAC

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