Tim May wrote:
On Tuesday, October 2, 2001, at 06:04 PM, Steve Furlong wrote:
Tim May wrote:
I know that I if I am ever stopped for photographing a dam or a bridge I hope I'll have the courage to tell the cop to fuck off. If arrested on such a bogus charge, things will escalate dramatically and I would be forced to Plan B.
Strong suggestion: don't phrase it quite that way. Don't give the jack-booted thug any real grounds for arrest, or even "detention".
Fuck that.
Some quick research shows me that some states no longer make it aggravated harassment to swear at a cop, though it's still an offense in some states. I couldn't find Indiana's status on that, but it looks like your method might be successful.
It might be even worse for you, as a Californian, than for most Americans. Isn't California one of the states which requires all citizens to "cooperate" with police? With cooperation presumably defined as "whatever the pig wants you to do".
No. You really have been reading too many of the "Happy Fun Court is Not Amused" arguments and not enough about probable cause, the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, and the C. in general. There certain is no "requirement to cooperate."
<shrug> I really thought I had come across that in Findlaw or somewhere. Maybe it was a proposal that was shot down, maybe it's in other states, maybe you're wrong. I don't see it in a Findlaw search just now, but I'm not even sure what it would be called. Certainly not the "Citizen Bend Over and Spread 'Em Act", but things like "Police Assistance Act" and "Citizens Cooperation Act" didn't give any hits, either.
Where to do otherwise intelligent people pick up these bizarre ideas?
Heh. If you're referring to me, events of the past few days argue against my intelligence. More generally, it's probably a mixture of laziness, time pressure, the value of the effort needed to check every "fact" before posting, and "knowing" that something is true and therefore need not be checked. Posters to mailing lists and Usenet could treat every post as a submission to a refereed journal, but by the time the fact-checking was done, the thread would have died out. SRF -- Steve Furlong Computer Condottiere Have GNU, Will Travel 617-670-3793 "Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly while bad people will find a way around the laws." -- Plato