Thursday, March 20, 2008

Taking Pictures = Disorderly Conduct.

Apparently, using your cell phone to snap pictures of signs while standing in a public thoroughfare in Nashville can get you a visit with the police and the threat of arrest on bogus charges. Nice P-R work there, Officer Friendly.

If only they knew what kind of camera-wielding subversives actually lurked in their town!

(H/T to Unc.)

6 comments:

  1. There's a website out there (I can't for the life of me remember the name) about knowing your rights when the police question you. It's run by a guy that used to be an ACLU litigator (Fight evil with evil). It's a pretty informative site and I should probably go look for it.

    Anyway, they were talking about the war against cameras and police harassment a while back. Apparently, the police also get very very testy when you photgraph or video them. I wonder why. I'll have to look for that later...

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  2. Jim, I believe you're referring to
    http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm. I really need to contact Bert Krages and see if I can get permission to put it on a T-shirt. It'd be neat to have a copy of the law on your shirt in the mug shot--"gee, judge, how could we have known it's legal?"

    Yes, I do have an attitude problem.

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  3. Uhhh, did I have some sort of innerspatial relative time warp experience wher I now live in a world that makes no sense at all??? WTF is wrong with people these days???

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  4. Thanks for all the hits -- you have a lot of fans. :)

    Clearly, the cop in question saw my question as a challenge to his authority. It wasn't -- it was intended to "cut to the chase," and allow me to go back to my dinner and a conversation I was having with a couple of other diners. I recognize the cops' right to conduct an investigation, but after him telling me I couldn't take a photo of something inside a business clearly visible from the sidewalk without the business's permission, I grew wary of the bullshit, then and there. I knew better than that. So, the ol' ACLU staple, "Am I being detained?" came to mind, and I skipped that and simply asked if I had violated the law, and was I being charged.

    Other forums have suggested I should tell everyone where this business is, etc., which I'm not gonna do. Sure, they overreacted, which DID annoy me, and hence I didn't want to tell them why I'd taken the photos. But I recommended calling the cops, to the "aggrieved." She took me up on it, and I say, "Good for her." I was polite, calm, and even in my tone -- at no time did I consider imminent negative outcomes for me, or anyone else.

    Still, thanks for reading, folx.
    .

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  5. Pro-tip: Just delete the picture, then recover it later. Thank god for FAT-only deletion.

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