At 03:13 PM 7/28/2006, Steve Schear wrote to Cypherpunks:
It's an article about a kid in Philly who used his cell phone to photograph a bunch of police, and was hauled off to jail and threatened with being charged with obstruction of justice and a number of other things, including breaking "a new law that prohibits people from taking pictures of police with cell phones." After about an hour, his parents got him out, with police saying that he was lucky because there was no supervisor on duty. The ACLU says there's no such new law. No big surprise. Cops routinely lie, and they often beat up photographers and smash cameras. The time I was arrested for photographing police, who were harassing a friend of mine and stealing his car radio, it was before the Rodney King case, and I was using a camera with real chemical film in it. Somehow the film got exposed to light and the camera got broken a bit before they gave it back. Unfortunately, there was a supervisor on duty (he'd been at the scene of the alleged crime), so I did get charged with something, which got dropped after I paid for a lawyer and the case came up for trial. Supervisors lie just as much as regular police - don't believe anything they tell you about court procedures :-) My friend's case did get to trial - the police did lots of lying on the witness stand, but unfortunately his car registration really _had_ expired, and since that charge stuck they also got to bust him for a burned-out taillight. And these cops were just local boys and girls - John Young gets to have Feds lie to him... Bill Stewart