Photographing Dams

[Steve Furlong]

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