Jerome Vorus was taking pictures of the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. last July when he decided to snap some photographs of a routine traffic stop.
Little did he know he would soon find himself detained by police for photographing them without permission. Of course, Vorus was well within his rights, but he still had to wait an hour and a half in the back of a squad car before the officers released him.
Vorus filed a lawsuit last week against the District of Columbia and the four police officers involved in his detainment, claiming his Fourth and First Amendment rights were violated. He is being represented in his case by the American Civil Liberties Union.
There have been numerous cases like Vorus’ recently, where citizens are being detained, arrested or intimidated for documenting police activity or even just taking photos of government buildings.
“This is happening more and more,” Vorus said in a phone interview. “Police are arresting journalists, photographers and tourists, often using excuses like terrorism or security.”
Here’s a few more notable examples:
* On June 2, Miami police seized a man’s cell phone at gunpoint and smashed it after the man recorded an officer-involved shooting.
* A Rochester, New York woman was arrested in June for videotaping police from her front yard. She was charged with obstructing justice.
* In January, two Illinois residents were charged with eavesdropping — a class I felony — after they recorded their encounters with Chicago police. One of the citizens, a woman, was recording her interview with two internal affairs investigators. She was filing a sexual harassment complaint against another Chicago police officer.
* A motorcyclist in Maryland was also charged with eavesdropping in April after he uploaded a video to YouTube — caught on his helmet cam — of a state trooper stopping him with a drawn gun. Police showed up at his house four days after the traffic stop with a warrant for four computers, two laptops and his camera.
The spike in arrests for photography has mirrored the rise of cell phone cameras and YouTube, which has made it easy for citizens to act as journalists and spread their videos to thousands, sometimes millions, of viewers on the Internet.
“Suddenly people who didn’t normally have cameras did,” said Carlos Miller, a Miami-based journalist, photographer and blogger. “And they were taking pictures. We then saw a huge increase in cops telling people they couldn’t do that.”
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/07/08/the-governments-war-on-cameras/#ixzz1RXNQlMKW
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