"Chief Constable Andy Trotter"
Hah, you couldn't make this stuff up?
That's all.
4 x 6 prints of this post will be available in the foyer after the show.
Police snapper silliness reaches new heights
After lagging well behind other forces for most of the year, City of London Police are now making a late surge to take the coveted El Reg prize for most absurd photographic intervention of 2009. We were not especially impressed by their sending of seven officers in three cars and a riot van to deal with architectural …
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Monday 14th December 2009 10:54 GMT David S 1
Appalling...
...manner in which the people stopped get threatened and entrapped into committing arrestable offences by the police:
1. Photographer is stopped and questioned, being asked to give name, show permit, show the police the photos they have been taking, etc, just for the reason that they are taking photos. They may be challenged by "security people" or PCSOs.
2. There is no reasonable suspicion that they are engaged in terrorist activity, and so there is no reason for the stopped person to answer the questions. This is particularly the case if the person stopped them is a security person or a PCSO.
3. Person stopped objects and argues about it.
4. If it is not a policeman/policewomen who has stopped the person so far, the police are alerted, and we go back to step 1, with the police asking the questions this time round. If it is a policeman/policewoman, carry onto step 5.
5. For not complying with the request, stopped person is then threatened with being charged with a different offence (eg, obstruction) which would be easier to pin on them.
6. Stopped person has now been entrapped intop apparently committing this new offence which has resulted entirely from the police's unreasonable request to begin with.
It is useless expecting government officials to say something and the police to modify their behaviour: the police will just carry on until there are real consequences arising from entrapment activities and over-reaction to stopping people from taking photographs. Photographers will have to risk arrest, and having their DNA taken, etc, leading to failing future CRB checks and so on in order to try to mount successful legal challenges to all this that are not guaranteed to succeed unless there is specific protection under law to taking photos, which I don't see happening. The problem is compounded by the risk that, if journalists are at the forefront of this, then a "quick fix" will be carried out (as in the case of showing a journalist card when being asked to show a non-existent "permit") which will protect journalists and not other members of the public.
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Monday 14th December 2009 11:14 GMT Dennis O'Neill
It's not just terror, though
Photographers are prevented form taking pix because of the old "PEEDOOO!!" cry too, you know. For years, I happliy took photos of my lad playing football with his (relentlessly rubbish) team and the only ones who complained were the parents of kids whose pics I HADN'T managed to get ("What's wrong with my boy?" was the moan.)
Since he quit, however, I have seen at least two games at the local public park where a photographer was told, by a game's referee of all people, that he had to remove himself from the park or the ref would refuse to allow the game to continue. Even though it is perfectly clear that you can take photos of whoever you like in a public place,* and despite the fact that there are no rules/recommendations form the FA about taking pix of football matches taking place in a public park, either, at an amateur level.
*I'm well aware that you can't make commercial gain from photos that rely on an identifiable member of the public without getting a model release form signed. This was a teenager from, presumably, the local school carrying out one of his GCSE/A level projects, at a guess; the other was just some bloke out with his camera
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
