Photography is Not a Crime

By Carlos Miller
Despite how often people accuse me of being “anti-cop”, I do like to point out when police officers actually protect our Constitutional rights to take pictures. I just wish it would happen more often.

Tom Chamberlain tells us how he recently came across a repairman working on one of those annoying red light cameras at a traffic intersection in Gurnee, Illinois.

Wanting to take pictures of the inside of the control box, he pulled over and started snapping photos without getting in the guy’s way.

Chamberlain figured that since the Redflex cameras are tax-funded and are on public land - not to mention that they take pictures of hundreds of unsuspecting citizens a day - then surely nobody would mind him taking a few photos of the inside of the control box.

But Chamberlain was wrong.

The repairman told him he was not allowed to take photos.

Chamberlain continued taking photos.

The repairman called police.

Chamberlain continued taking photos.

Police arrived on the scene and told the repairman that Chamberlain had the right to take photos.

Chamberlain continued taking photos.

Says Chamberlain: “I was lucky the Gurnee police were very professional and protected my rights to take pictures on public property.”

Check out the sequence of events in the photos below. They speak for themselves so they don’t even need captions.

By Carlos Miller
The Virginia woman who was jailed after spending almost a year blogging about the Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement (JADE) task force, taunting them as they continually warned her to stop, says she is hesitant about receiving legal help from the ACLU because she doesn’t want to make these cops mad.

It’s probably a little too late for that. And considering she is unemployed and was unable to pay for her bond at first, she should probably accept any help she can get.

But Elisha Strom obviously marches to the beat of her own drum.

She hasn’t decided whether to accept the ACLU’s offer of assistance, which could be legal representation or an amicus brief. “I’d be interested in talking to them,” she says from her home in Bedford County. “The only thing I’d worry about is making JADE mad.”

While she says she doesn’t feel threatened by the drug task force, she does feel intimidated. “They’re already upset with me,” she says. “I don’t want to end up with 40 new charges because I’m getting support.”

Right now, she is facing one count of harassment stemming from a blog entry where she posted photos of one of the cop’s house.

By Carlos Miller
San Francisco fare inspectors have once again proven clueless when it comes to photographers’ rights.

This time, it took a 16-year-old high school kid to educate them.

The student was filming inside a rail car of the San Francisco Municipal Railway - what the locals call the “Muni” - when he was confronted by a pair of fare inspectors who told him he was not allowed to film them.

The student kept filming and kept asserting his First Amendment rights to film on public property. One inspector told him that it was not public property, but private property.

The railway is funded by the county and city, so you decide whether it is public or private property.

Another inspector threatened to sue him if his image appeared online, before demanding his personal information.

The student ended up being detained for 20 minutes.

The student filed a complaint and received a form letter response.

The story was posted on the San Francisco Appeal, which contacted Muni spokesperson Judson True, who refused to comment on this specific incident, but confirmed that the Muni is updating its policy of taking pictures inside rail cars and train stations.

“Yes, and the policy will say that non-commercial video and photography will be OK as long as it doesn’t disturb transit.”

“We have a little more work to do to get it written up and clarified. But we should have it soon.”

After all, this is not the first time fare inspectors have gone overboard with their authority.

By Carlos Miller
Miami blogger Random Pixels has been one of the harshest critics of The Miami Herald but he has also been known to compliment them on occassion.

But only when it comes to certain reporters and photographers. When it comes to publisher Anders Gyllenhaal, Random Pixels, who is a photojournalist named Bill Cooke, has been relentless.

It got to the point where Gyllenhaal emailed the blogger on one occasion, asking him to stop emailing him his frequent criticisms of the Herald.

“Bill, Please be so kind as to take me off your email list. I make it a point to keep up with informed and responsible criticism of the paper, which is invaluable. I can see that’s not your interest when you find fault with virtually anything this dedicated, capable staff takes on. Anders”

So clearly, Random Pixels has been able to get under the skin of a man who you would hope would be able to brush it off.

On Tuesday, Random Pixels posted one of his positives posts complimenting a couple of Herald photographers with the respective photos they took.

The pictures, which I’ve reposted below, are definitely worth sharing. Especially the top one. One of those split-second moments of natural beauty.

On Wednesday, Suzanne Levinson, whose title is Director of Site Operations for the Miami Herald, sent Random Pixels the following in an email:

It has been brought to our attention that the web page located at http://randompixels.blogspot.com/2009/08/random-pixels-recognizes.html has content reproduced from The Miami Herald and MiamiHerald.com.

Please remove these photos and any other Miami Herald content present on your site immediately.
[...]
[We] do not allow reproduction of complete stories or full-sized photos.
[...]
Please reply with confirmation of action taken within 5 business days or this matter will be forwarded to the McClatchy Company’s legal department for further action.

It doesn’t appear that Levinson is familiar with photography because anyone can tell you that photos posted on the internet are low-resolution, meaning they are not “full-sized photos.”

Random Pixels has not removed the photos, citing “fair use” rights, which allows the reproduction of certain copyrighted material without obtaining permission for use in non-commercial manners.

While many bloggers, including me, cite fair use as they use another publication’s photographs (with credit, of course), it is still a gray area that has not been fully defined within our legal system, as far as I know.

But like many newspapers, the Herald is struggling to keep from drowning in debt, so we wonder if this is the most logical battle to pursue.

Charles Trainor Jr./The Miami Herald

Joe Rimkus Jr./The Miami Herald

Exclusive Coverage

Randall Thomas was standing in the area circled in blue when he started filming the FBI building across the street. A Homeland Security Officer pulled up and parked in the same spot circled in yellow (but in a different direction). The fed handcuffed him and made him sit on the curb in the area circled in red for ten minutes.(Photo courtesy of Google Maps)

By Carlos Miller
A 43-year-old man was jailed for six hours – and had his camera and memory card confiscated by a judge - after filming an FBI building from across the street in New York City Monday.

Randall Thomas, a professional photographer, said he was standing on the corner of Duane Street and Broadway in downtown Manhattan when he used his video camera to pan up and down on the 42-story building at 26 Federal Plaza.

He was immediately accosted by a security guard in a brown uniform who told him he was not allowed to film the building.

Thomas asserted his legal right to film from a public street. The guard called a Homeland Security Officer who asked Thomas what he was filming.

“I said ‘that’s none of your business,’” Thomas said in a telephone interview with Photography is Not a Crime Wednesday night.

The federal officer handcuffed Thomas and sat him on the curb for ten minutes, before escorting him inside the same FBI building and taking him to the 10^th floor and placing him in a holding cell.

His charges: Disorderly conduct; failure to comply and impeding duties of a federal officer.

During his incarceration, the feds persuaded Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV to sign a search warrant that authorized them to confiscate his camera and memory card, which were not returned to him when he was released six hours later.

This is not his first run-in he’s had with authorities for using his cameras in public. Two years ago, he was arrested for taking a still photo of the same building. He was escorted into the same building where he was handcuffed to a pole for two hours and interrogated by feds.

He ended up pleading not guilty to two misdemeanors but said he never heard back about that case, so he assumes it was somehow dropped from the system.

He also has an ongoing case with the Civilian Complaint Review Board after he says he was assaulted by a group of NYPD officers in Times Square for filming them in February.

“It’s crazy how they can arrest me when you can see the same building on Google Maps,” he said.

During our interview last night, we both pulled up the FBI building on Google Maps on our respective computers and he explained where he was standing, where he was forced to sit after he was handcuffed and where the Homeland Security Officer parked.

In fact, in the Google Maps picture, there is the same type of vehicle parked in the same spot except it is pointed in a different direction than it was when it pulled up to arrest him.

Two months ago, a photographer in Arlington, Virginia was ordered to delete a photo of a federal building even though I was able to pull up that same building on Google Maps in seconds, as I did with the FBI building in New York.

Maybe they’ll come barging down my door for panning up and down the building on Google Maps.

Here is a PDF Thomas compiled that includes a copy of the search warrant, his citations and definition of the statutes he is accused of violating.

Google Maps allows one to pan up and down the FBI building in the same manner Thomas was doing when he was arrested.

-30-

I am a multimedia journalist who has been fighting a lengthy legal battle after having photographed Miami police against their wishes in Feb. 2007. Please help the fight by donating to my Legal Defense Fund in the top left sidebar, which helps pay for the thousands of dollars I’ve acrued in debt since my arrest. To keep updated on the latest articles, join my networks at Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed.

By Carlos Miller
Nowadays, it seems that anybody who has an issue with cops has launched a blog.

There is that guy in Phoenix who got raided. That woman in Virginia who got raided.

And a few of us who have not been raided. Yet.

The latest to emerge on the scene is a blogger from Miami who has dedicated his blog to a single cop from the Miami-Dade Police Department.

The cop’s name is Jorge Baluja and he is the subject of The Straw Buyer blog, which was launched a little over a month ago.

The blogger, who is remaining anonymous, claims that Baluja botched an investigation into mortgage fraud last year that resulted in the arrest of three people, including a Miami attorney.

The lawyer, Delaila Estefano, along with John Romney and Michael Martinez, are accused of using identity theft to obtain a mortgage to buy a house for three times more than it was paid for less than a week earlier.

The man whose identity was allegedly stolen is named Bernardo Barreira.

Here is the Miami Herald’s article on the arrest.

The Straw Buyer believes that Barreira is the guilty party in this case even though he is being listed as the victim. The blogger also claims that Barreira has not only has committed mortgage fraud in the past, but has also reported his identity stolen in a previous unrelated case, which in his opinion, only proves his guilt in the latter case.

Baluja, who was assigned to the Miami-Dade Police Department’s Mortgage Fraud Task Force at the time of the arrest, has since been transferred to  the auto theft department, which the blogger claims is a demotion.

The blogger also points out that Baluja also botched a previous investigation involving an auto collision in 2003 in which the Miami-Dade Independent Review Panel recommend he get more training.

Matt Meltzer, my colleague at Miami Beach 411, wrote about that incident recently.

And the blogger claims that Baluja botched his own mortgage, making him unqualified to conduct a proper investigation into any alleged mortgage fraud.

And in that post, the blogger even goes as far as posting a photo of what is supposedly Baluja’s house, which if you remember, that is what got prompted police to arrest a Virginia blogger.

However, he did not list the address and he simply used a Google Images photo instead of taking it himself.

And finally, the blogger claims that Baluja has missed the last four depositions regarding the mortgage fraud case, which you would think would place him in contempt of court. But police officers apparently have their own rules.

The blogger has been persistent in notifying local bloggers and journalists about his crusade and it is likely that Baluja is well aware of its existence.

So don’t be surprised if you hear about another raid on another blogger in the near future.

By Carlos Miller
Tasering incidents have gone so mainstream.

Before, it would take a high profile incident like a University of Florida student trying to ask John Kerry some hard questions - only to end up getting Tased and carted away - to generate any national news coverage.

And that was only because the student’s final words - “Don’t Tase me, bro” - were turned into a national punchline.

But nobody is laughing now.

Americans are beginning to realize that all they have to do is catch the cop on the wrong day at the wrong time and they can wind up with 50,000 volts of electricity ripping through their body.

Get in an argument with your girlfriend? You get a Taser stuck up your ass.

Grandma disputes a traffic ticket with a cop? She gets Tasered on the side of the road.

Grandpa insists on driving his tractor during a parade? He gets Tasered repeatedly.

Teen daughter throws a tantrum over the guys she is texting? She gets Tasered on the side of the head.

It don’t matter if you’re a pregnant woman, a 6-year-old child or a deaf, disabled man.

And the list goes on and on and on.

The latest Tasering incident to make national news, including The Today Show, involved a suburban mother who was Tasered in front of her kids because she disputed a traffic ticket. She is now suing.

The irony is that these devices were introduced as “less lethal weapons,” meaning that they were meant to be used as a replacement for guns. When police began using them ten years ago, they predicted that they would kill less people because they now had the ability to torture people instead.

But if there has been a decline in officer-involved shootings over the last decade, nobody is bringing that fact to the limelight, which indicates there has not been a decline. A search through the FBI website will promptly tell you how many cops were killed, but they make you file a Freedom of Information request if you want to find out how many people were killed by cops throughout the country over the last few years.

And the truth is, Taser guns are anything but less than lethal. Between 2001 and 2008, more than 350 people died after being Tasered by police, according to Amnesty International.

About 50 a year. Almost one death a week.

Last month in Canada, a judge called for tighter control of Taser guns after controversy over a death of an airline passenger in 2007.

Last Saturday, one of the most influential Hispanic organizations in the United States, the League of United Latin American Organizations, called for the end of Taser guns in police departments across the country, claiming that the blacks and Hispanics are the most common groups Tasered.

And the BBC yesterday published a piece on how Taser incidents have been on the rise in the United Kingdom.

In the latter three articles, police spokespeople from three different countries all defended the use of Tasers as vital for the safety of citizens.

Canadian official: “When properly used in appropriate situations, by officers who are well trained, the (Taser) is a useful tool, that contributes to officer and public safety.”

UK official: “They are making a real difference on our streets and helping to keep both the public and our police officers safe.”

Albuquerque official: “The department feels it’s a good tool, it keeps the officer safe, it keeps the citizens safe and it saves lives.”

Who do they think they are kidding?

By Carlos Miller
Donald May spent three months in jail because a central Florida cop thought the breath mints in his mouth were crack cocaine.

The Kissimmee cop even claims he field tested the mints, which proved the mints were crack.

The cop also claimed he saw May buy the drugs and even went as far as claiming that May admitted to buying the drugs.

However, May was pulled over for an expired tag, not for purchasing drugs.

Unable to bond out of jail, May ended up losing his job, apartment and car during the three months he was incarcerated.

It wasn’t until further testing proved the mints to be mints that he was released.

May is now suing, according to the article.

By Carlos Miller
Robert Griffin had rented out a portion of a park in Littleton, Colorado for his wedding in 2007.

But on that day, he ended up getting into a verbal argument with a park employee over a parking spot. The park employee called the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office who dispatched a deputy.

The deputy gave Griffin a ticket for, you guessed it, disorderly conduct. You would think a man is entitled to be a little disorderly on his wedding day.

But even after handing him the ticket, Griffin says the deputy kept pushing him, eventually Tasing him five to six times before carting him off to jail in front of his entire wedding party.

He finally made it to the altar three hours later. Some guys might have taken the incident as an omen, avoiding the altar altogether.

Griffin, who was using his wedding as a fundraiser for a children group, challenged the deputy to a three-round kickboxing match with a 50/50 split of the proceeds and his half going to the charity.

But the sheriff’s office refused that offer. Obviously, they are not so brave once the badges, guns and Tasers are removed.

So now he says he has no choice but to sue.

The cop who detained Dylan

By Carlos Miller
While we can all point and laugh at the twentysomething cops who didn’t recognize Bob Dylan, the questions nobody seems to be asking are:

• Why was he being questioned in the first place?
• And so what if he didn’t produce an identification?
• And what would have happened if he had refused to sit in the back of the squad car?

Unless he was engaged in an illegal activity, it really shouldn’t have made a difference if he said he was Bob Dylan or Dylan Thomas or Dylan McKay.

Or Robert Zimmerman, for that matter.

The longtime musician, who is known to have introduced weed to the Beatles, was wandering around a New Jersey neighborhood on July 23.

Residents became suspicious when he was peering into the window of their house, which had a “for sale” sign on it. Apparently, they were hoping to sell the property uninspected.

But even after peering into the window, he continued walking down the street with one of the residents following him.

Instead of simply asking, “excuse me sir, may I help you,” the resident called the cops.

After all, Dylan came across as an “eccentric-looking old man”  (typecasts who have even been known to afford houses ) because he was wearing a hood. I would probably also be wearing a hood considering it was raining.

The Long Branch officers who showed up were Kristie Buble and Derrick Meyers, both 24 years old.

Here is how Buble explains the encounter:

“We got a call for a suspicious person,” Buble said. “It was pouring rain outside, and I was right around the corner so I responded. By that time he was walking down the street. I asked him what he was doing in the neighborhood and he said he was looking at a house for sale.”

“I asked him what his name was and he said, ‘Bob Dylan,’ Buble said. “Now, I’ve seen pictures of Bob Dylan from a long time ago and he didn’t look like Bob Dylan to me at all. He was wearing black sweatpants tucked into black rain boots, and two raincoats with the hood pulled down over his head.

Isn’t it possible that his name could have been Bob Dylan and not be the Bob Dylan?

Dylan goes on to explain that he is touring with Willy Nelson and John Mellencamp, two musicians I’m sure she would also fail to recognize.

“He was acting very suspicious,” Buble said. “Not delusional, just suspicious. You know, it was pouring rain and everything.”

No, Kristie, I don’t know what you mean by “suspicious.”

So what if he was walking in the rain?

So what if was wearing rain boots and two raincoats with a hood over his head?

The story gets even more absurd as Buble suggests that since she has even gone through special training, she managed to get him to sit inside the cop car without getting Tased.

Following her police training, Buble said she indulged him.

“OK Bob, why don’t you get in the car and we’ll drive to the hotel and go verify this?’ ” she said she told him. “I put him in the back of the car. To be honest with you, I didn’t really believe this was Bob Dylan. It never crossed my mind that this could really be him.”

Dylan was very easy-going throughout the encounter, perhaps having smoked one of those funny cigarettes he offered the Beatles back during the early 60s.

But what if he would have declined her generous offer of sitting in the back of the squad car?

That, my friends, would probably go down as another Tasering story. Probably the most famous yet.

By Carlos Miller
A frail 84-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s wanders a Walmart parking lot in Ohio holding a steak knife. She allegedly is threatening to cut people. She had already cut herself.

Police arrive on the scene and one officer grabs the woman by the wrist and slams her to the ground.

It is all caught on video, which shows the woman bleeding from what appears to be the back of her head, although reports do say she had cut herself.

Now the Whitehall Police Department is receiving calls from all over the nation accusing them of police brutality and racism.

I don’t see any evidence of racism other than the cop is white and the woman is black.

And while it’s true that there was probably a better way to persuade the woman to drop the knife, we all know cops are not trained to rationalize with people. Especially mental health patients.

They are trained to kill when there is even a slight indication that a person is not going to relinquish a weapon.

So I guess this woman is lucky she didn’t raise the knife in any manner.

Otherwise, she would have been pumped full of bullets.

By Carlos Miller
She was a white supremacist who obsessed over a police department relentlessly - possibly neglecting her daughter in the process - but Elisha Strom was still wrongfully arrested for the contents of her blog.

And The Washington Post agrees in an editorial published earlier this week:

In a nearly year-long barrage of blog posts, she published snapshots she took in public of many or most of the task force’s officers; detailed their comings and goings by following them in her car; mused about their habits and looks; hinted that she may have had a personal relationship with one of them; and, in one instance, reported that she had tipped off a local newspaper about their movements.

Predictably, this annoyed law enforcement officials, who, it’s fair to guess, comprised much of her readership before her arrest. But what seems to have sent them over the edge — and skewed their judgment — is Ms. Strom’s decision to post the name and address of one of the officers with a street-view photo of his house.

All this information was publicly available, including the photograph, which Ms. Strom gleaned from municipal records.

Ms. Strom is not the most sympathetic symbol of free-speech rights. She has previously advocated creating a separate, all-white nation, and her blog veers from the whimsical to the self-righteous to the bizarre. But the real problem here is the Virginia statute, in which an overly broad, ill-defined ban on harassment-by-identification, specifically in regard to police officers, seems to criminalize just about anything that might irritate targets.

It should not be a crime to annoy the cops, whose raid on Ms. Strom’s house looks more like a fit of pique than an act of law enforcement. Some of her postings may have consisted of obnoxious speech, but they were nonetheless speech and constitutionally protected. That would hold true right up through her last blog post, written as the police raid on her home began at 7 a.m.: “Uh-Oh They’re Here.”

By Carlos Miller
All David Dorsey wanted was an interview with Deion Sanders.

The Fort Myers News-Press sports reporter had already interviewed the former NFL star and Fort Myers native on previous occasions about his youth football team.

But when he tried to access the field after a game in Naples to interview Sanders, who was standing at midfield talking with other reporters, Naples police denied him access.

Apparently they were taking cues from a member of Sanders’ staff who told cops he didn’t recognize Dorsey.

Sanders, known as Prime Time and Neon Deion throughout his career, has never been media shy.

Dorsey, who did hot have a press pass (and is not legally required to have one), provided the cops with his drivers license.

But officers Bijan Razilou and Benjamin Vasquez didn’t believe him.

In fact, they believed he intended to hurt Sanders because one of the officers wrote in his report that he “feared for the safety of Mr. Sanders based upon my previous contact with Mr. Dorsey and the numerous lawful commands I gave him to stay away.”

Dorsey persisted on entering the field and was finally handcuffed and carted away. On what charges I have no clue because it all took place in a public park.

It wasn’t until Sanders’ mother told the cops that Dorsey was legit that they released him.

Now the News-Press has filed a letter of intent to sue the City of Naples.

The News-Press Executive Editor Terry Eberle said Dorsey was just doing his job.

“It’s outrageous that the Naples police officers thought they should take orders from a citizen and to treat another citizen in such a brutish manner,” Eberle said. “He had every right to be on the sidelines. That’s his First Amendment right, not to mention it’s a public park, paid for with taxpayer dollars.”