"George@Orwellian.Org" wrote:

Found in Usenet, watched all four video clips.

Someone had their car wired for sound, someone else hidden with a video camera, when the police decided to pull the car over for no reason other than a random check.

See my solution to this sort of abuse in my article in the 2.12 issue of WIRED: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.12/sandfort.if.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_s et= No one should have any objections to wiring cops. A secure record only hurts bad cops; it protects good cops--all 17 of them. :-D (Sorry, Lon.) S a n d y

At 01:22 PM 6/22/2001 -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote:

Listen to it again -- doesn't she say "I'm recording this"??

Yes, she does - but the recorder would either have been on her person (in which case it would have been taken from her before she was sitting in the back of the police car), or in her car. In either case, it wouldn't have been in a good position to get a nice clear audio recording of the final part where the two cops stand on the roadside and talk about whether or not they can seize her reading material as evidence on the obstructing justice charge. The only way you're going to get nice clear audio like that is if the cop has a lapel mike with a wireless transmitter, and they're pretty common among cops now, especially among highway patrol/state troopers, who make a lot of traffic stops and DUI stops (where they can usually control positioning of their car/camera vis-a-vis the suspect and their car), which are ripe for automated evidence recording from a dash-mounted video camera + short-range radio transmitter/mike combination. City cops spend more of their time farther away from their cars, in buildings, etc - so city police departments usually put A/V equipment in special DUI task force cars instead of in every car. It's also not uncommon for cops who want their own recording, or for less well-funded departments, to use an old-fashioned microcassette recorder on the cop's duty belt or in a chest pocket where the built-in mic can get pretty good audio. I'm very confident that the video is from the trooper's own car - because of the positioning, because of the "VSP", because you can see the push bar on the cop car's front bumper at the bottom of the frame, and because I'm really skeptical that someone else with a video camera would be able to get close enough to get that shot without being run off by the cops, unless they used a strong zoom lens, which are hard to keep stable - even on a tripod - unless you've got really nice + heavy equipment. Besides, assuming that's true, where's the cop car? We can tell it's behind the woman's car, because you can see its flashing lights reflected on the troopers' uniforms and on the street signs - so it's near the camera. If the car is in between the camera and the woman's car, why didn't we see it or its lights? Or if the camera is in between the cop car and the woman's car, why didn't the cops see the camera during the encounter .. especially given that the camera's not on the ground hidden in (apparently) a scrap of roadside trash, or else we'd see a really different perspective. Ok, maybe someone set up thousands of dollars of nice video equipment in a duck blind or something and then hid across the street with a parabolic mike to get the audio .. because they knew this was going to happen? Occam's Razor says this recording was made by the cops. Not that the identity of the party making the recording diminishes the constitutional issues here about unreasonable search & seizure, right to remain silent, right to freely read & associate & travel, etc., under both the US and VA constitutions. On the other hand, if you're driving you can be asked to produce a drivers' license, and cops can ask you to identify yourself if you're out in public - but they must accept your oral self-report regarding your identity, and can't arrest you for not carrying "your papers", unless you're in a class of persons who must carry their papers, like some non-citizens and people who are driving. If this was meant to be some sort of test case or demonstration of police misconduct, it gets off to a bad start that way - I don't know if everything that followed is justifiable under VA law, but they weren't out of line (in a non-Choate universe, anyway) asking for her drivers' license if they saw her driving that car. I didn't see anything that looked to me like obstructing an officer or assaulting an officer. -- Greg Broiles gbroiles@well.com "Organized crime is the price we pay for organization." -- Raymond Chandler

Anyone have any luck tracking this down to a case name/number and a link on a virginia .gov website? Or is this some elaborate hoax?

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The lady complains about being stopped and asked for her papers...

http://www.infowars.com/index.html#ps