I might suggest in the future you refer to moderation as “drugging and raping” just, so, you know… it’s in perspective.

This would count as “trolling” the police. Note of course that trolling might not always be a bad thing if it’s designed to prove a point.

He was filming the street. The cop goes by unconcerned. He then focuses in on the cop, and stays on him, even after the cop was getting uncomfortable. When the cop does finally get uncomfortable enough to take the bait and (dumbly) puts his hand on the camera, the photographer immediately starts saying he’s been “assaulted.” Naturally this is not being “assaulted,” but the photographer had been hoping all along that he would be. In the succeeding argument, it’s clear that the photographer has planned all the things he’s going to say to make his case.

Again, it’s probably good that this kind of trolling goes on to highlight a know problem. Then again, I just have to wonder how many cops he filmed before one of them finally took the bait.

I think that you might have accidentally wandered into the wrong blog. Or are you just trolling?

Since when is filming or making photos a suspicious activity? How does street photography harm anyone’s security? Pardon my French, but what the fuck are you talking about?

I grab people’s asses for a living. Maybe I should add something to the waiver.

why should that make a reasonable person afraid?

Probably because it’s done by loud people wearing a uniform that has a history of shooting innocent people without warning.

Besides, assault has no “reasonable person” test. It is concerned with the beliefs of the actual person. Their beliefs have to be “reasonable” (which basically means “rational” – based on observation and reasoning, not paranoia), but it is what they believed that counts, not what some third party would have believed in their position.

This is consistent with all crimes against the person. You don’t want to look at whether a reasonable person would have had their leg broken, you look at whether the actual person did have their actual leg broken. These things all fall under the same group of laws.

I’ll agree that people go a little overboard and have crazy thoughts about the world falling apart, but you have to admit the two in the video are absolutely horrible at their ‘job’, and that most people would have been turned off of doing something they have every right to do and causes no one any harm, and fooling people into believing they don’t have a given freedom is a really bad thing to happen to society just because two duchebags don’t know how to interact in our civil society.

It would be a little different if the video wasn’t so damning of the two ‘officers’. Their job might well be to go over, put their hand over the camera, and talk to the guy for a few minutes to see what was going on, and maybe attempt to get him to stop out of some courtesy to a member of the public who has complained, but the officers where jackasses.

This article reminds me of how ‘How Cops Really Want to Police’ which really frightens me:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/how-cops-really-want-to-police/

especially disturbing are those who think police taking matters into their own hands is ‘good’ because the people ‘appreciate it’.

Sorry to be a jerk, but I was SO MUCH looking forward to it.

Fair question. Thanks for asking. The project has been returned to the Design Committee yet again. The problem is that while I can build just about anything from a phono preamp to a kilowatt class power amp with materials on hand, I’m a bit challenged aesthetically. Here are some pix of a few other tube amps I’ve done.
If I’m going to go to the considerable trouble to build another amp – goodness knows I don’t NEED any more – I don’t want to ruin it with amateurish aesthetics. I just don’t have the visual vocabulary to make it look Steampunk-y. As you can see from the pix of my other amps, previous designs have been strictly functional for the sake of compactness, safety and ease of build. Making a fancy chassis and brass doo-dads adds considerably to the complexity, and building tube amps is pretty challenging to begin with.
To give me flexibility in the physical design to do some creative visual features I’m leaning toward a hybrid design: a tube preamp section with big good looking visible tubes on top and a solid state power amp stage hidden inside to provide at least 100W/channel so it can drive real-world speakers. I’d like the final product to be more than an expensive, good looking dust collector. I have the solid state amp modules built already.
I planned to build this in July and demo it at the Southeast Michigan Audio Club meet in August. I’m still kinda on track to do that.
As this develops I’ll be describing it on
AudioKarma.org. Just do a forum search on ‘Boing Boing Steampunk’ and you’ll find it.

(or really funny, but I’m having trouble convincing myself of that)

so if a black person kills someone somewhere at some point then reasonable people will forever be allowed to fear all black people forever? awesome logic!

Impressive gibberish. The UK police force is known to have a “secret” policy of shooting innocent people without warning if they are suspected of being a terrorist. This policy is called “Operation Kratos”. While we now know that it exists, we still do not know under what circumstances innocent people are subject to summary execution (“suspected of being a suicide bomber” could mean anything), so you have to assume you are at risk any time a member of the police force is present. This is not an extrapolation from past results. This is a documented policy.

Note also that this is the same police force which has declared photography to be an indication of terrorism. If you are holding a camera and a police officer becomes “suspicious”, there is a very real policy to shoot you without warning.

“but it is what they believed that counts, not what some third party would have believed in their position.”

*cough* BULLSHIT *cough* and if otherwise I’m totally going to sick the cops on you for assaulting me on the internet… Where do you live where assault is unprovable? because I want to go there and file a metric crap ton of civil suits.

More incomprehensible gibberish. I’m guessing that you’re claiming that the millions of assault cases heard in the UK every year are unproven. I can only presume that the total number of assault cases you have observed or reviewed is zero. Proving assault can in some cases be complicated, but it is done every day. It is no more difficult than the usual problem of proving intent, which occurs in most criminal trials, and is approached in the same way.

The absence of people management skills is what amazes me. You can get almost anybody to do almost anything with a little bit of charm. If a scam artist can get people to give him their life savings to buy ant farms, how hard is it to chat up someone with a video camera? If you’re really concerned that someone is creating surveillance tapes for nefarious purposes, wouldn’t you want them to film you? Wouldn’t you want them to have the maximum amount of positive interaction with you? Wouldn’t that be far more likely to let them know that the local constabulary is part of the neighborhood and knows what’s going on around them? These guys are just recruiting for al-Qaeda by pissing everybody off.

The whole point of this is that photography is not a suspicious activity.

Neither is understanding the law or standing up for your ever-dwindling rights, whether in the UK or the USA.

Also, if anyone is wasting time, it’s the pseudo-cops.

I agree that the guards in question *might* have overreacted to a person with a camera, but we should keep in mind that they were probably ordered to do so.

Even if it’s wrong to ban photography in public spaces (which I think it is), one has to ask whether it’s worth wasting the security guard’s time over a point of policy? The guard is not personally responsible for policy and has no input on making policy. They are doing their job as they have been instructed. If they have been told to go after photographers, then from what I saw in the video clip, they did their job. The fault lies with their policy-makers, not with the guards themselves.

Every time these things get to a higher-up, it turns out that the guards imagined the rule. Every time.

I’ll completely agree that it wouldn’t be part of their job, but I’m not sure I, or the law, would agree with you on the assault bit.

I wouldn’t consider touching another person (or their property) as assault unless the person doing the touching is intending to, or should reasonably know that it could, cause harm to them (or their property), or if they’ve asked/told you to stop…

What’s the difference if someone comes up to you on the street and puts their hand over your camera, or slaps you in the face? Either way its unwanted physical contact.

All that results from paying undue attention to photographers is that the “bad people” will just wind up using photographers as a tool to attract attention away from activities that are actually suspicious. Or attractive women work too, apparently.

Now, this is how I would do it: Multiple compatriots: Point man with break away camera starts filming as obviously as possible. Little old lady (co-conspirator) points out videoegrapher to cop – and fades away very quickly and quietly. Once cop takes bait, camera man pointed ignores him and turns away still filming to elicit the raising of a hand (whispered slur doesn’t hurt here if no chance of anyone else hearing it). As soon as cop raises hand, cameraman turns suddenly and jams camera into cop. Breakaway camera comes apart spectacularly and other agent in crowd screams “The cop hit him! The cop hit him!” – and fades away quickly. Camera man bends over and breaks concealed blood-pack on forehead and stands up with hands over face screaming “Why did you hit me!” This is all being filmed by several other confederates in crowd by now. Cop is now in crowd of witnesses that will all swear he struck the camera man and smashed his camera, any actual witnesses are long gone, everything is on tape from several angles. Other agents make calls from either public phones or pick-pocketed cellphones (taken during distraction) to public media about a “police riot” happening where the cops have fired in to the crowd. This is the cue for the fires to be started in public wastebaskets and a few windows smashed with rocks. All operatives at this level to perform one action and immediately leave. That ought to get things going. All video to be immediately uploaded to the web and spread at once.

Do you think I’ve been claiming that the person who was harmed needed to have acted reasonably? because I was saying the person who did the harm had to be unreasonable.

It’s reasonable people who say ‘yeah that girl was frightened, and it would have been avoided if that guy had acted reasonably’ not ‘that girl said she was frightened! send the guy to jail!!’

I’ll also note that it’s not ‘well he was holding a camera when he saw the police officer, we have nothing to do but send the cop to jail for assault’ it’s ‘that guy’s nuts, he believes he will be shot on sight by police if they see him holding a camera, he really needs some professional help’