Jack blogs:
I’ve been wanting to blog about this since I heard about it last week, but Vivir Latino and illvox and Racewire and a bunch of other folks have gotten to it already…
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Obstruction of justice and resisting arrest should really be renamed the Activist Charges, since they seem to be what all of us are threatened with whenever we’re arrested for either protesting or observing the cops and holding them accountable for their actions. The latter seems to particularly piss the cops off. I know this from personal experience, having been pepper sprayed along with other community members and seeing two friends being violently arrested for doing just that – questioning police actions, asking for badge numbers, taking pictures of their activity. All the charges against the two people arrested were dropped. Three members of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement’s Cop Watch were arrested while videotaping an arrest in Brooklyn in 2005. All charges against them were later dropped. When the cops went on a bike-confiscating frenzy in the East Village last summer, two people who dared to observe and question them were arrested. It happens over and over again.
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I talked to a young woman, Black about 17 years old the other day and she was videotaping raids by police in her neighborhood. She was beaten and kicked so bad, her jeans split and she had internal bruising. They took the video card out of her camera and called her “bitch” repeatedly like “we finally got the bitch”.
There’s been quite a few of these incidents.
Don’t forget disorderly conduct! But I see so many cases particularly of resisting arrest. I think the triad is something like, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and battery of a peace officer.
RadFem: Wow, that’s bad. Plus, as a journalist I know for a fact that unless you give up your film willingly the police cannot take it from you, they get make you go away but the courts have found they cannot confiscate your film (like the po-po care of course!).
Her camera was destroyed, I believe. But she’s been in and out of the doctors due to symptoms probably related to internal injuries in the abdomen.
I think the guy that taped the video of the Compton shootout (between LASD deputies, not anyone else) had a gun pointed at him (shown on video) but just had to move. Given the vantage point of that part of the video, the footage that was shown at a commission training session on use of force and a training session on internal investigations given by LASD’s office of those investigations, it must have his video that was used. I’m not sure how they got it in that case. But it could have been through other means than force. That video has been to many different agencies for training on cross-fire situations and contagion fire I guess they call it.