Seconds after BART police officer Johannes Mehserle shot and killed Oscar Grant, police immediately began confiscating cell phones containing videos that have yet to see the light of day. In fact, the only videos that have been seen by the public were filmed by people who managed to leave the scene before police confronted them. [More]This is posted under the title "Do police have the right to confiscate your camera?"
No, but as long as they're the "Only Ones," they have the power...
[Via Avg Joe]
11 comments:
You can bet if the cops had taking every cell that recorded this murder and there was only one side to this killing. The murderous cop would still be on the job and there would be one story to be told, the cops. The simple fact that these cops were trying to take people's phones to hide the fact makes everyone of them part of the crime of murder.
Does anyone need more proof that cops in our world today are your enemy?
I'd hang on to my property as best I could and would take the hit of the sure to follow 'resisting' charge...the cost would be substantial both in dollars and jail time but damn it, get a warrant or get out of my face.
If they didn't get them all it's going to be real fun watching the video(s) show up on youtube.
they showed up on youtube over a week ago. good thing indybay.org is on top of it, right?
Solzhenitsyn warned us about the government Organ operatives. Is "Gulag Archipelago" taught in grade school any more, or is it deemed somehow "too familiar"? I think "1984" and "Brave New World" have been replaced with tolerance and diversity manuals. Some things should not be tolerated.
Hundreds of people, 3 or 4 cops, and people surrendered their phones? Sigh.
Once your phone is confiscated, how are you to call 9-1-1 to summone the officers to take a report once you have been assaulted, robbed, etc. or someone has been killed? It appears that the police unions would then argue that more police officers needed to be hired to provide a secure environment.
Has anyone who had a phone or camera have it returned yet? It should not have taken this long for police to upload the video. Once uploaded the recording device is of no further use.
If the police really needed or wanted witnesses other than themselves, the entire train would have been halted and returned to the station.
Carry a second camera phone as a decoy.
"Is 'Gulag Archipelago' taught in grade school any more, or is it deemed somehow 'too familiar'?"
If there was ever a grade school in this land that taught from "Gulag", I'd have to see it to believe it. I'm trying to picture a high school curriculum now that would teach from Solzhenitsyn, and I can't see that, either.
It would be very timely material and it ought to be, but it's very difficult to imagine public schools letting students anywhere near it.
Published in the West in '73.
Seems I remember some of the hardier readers in my high school at least carrying it around. I think it was discussed in humanities class, though not by history or government teachers. We needed to know about drop in the demand for silk during the French Revolution, though, and how many hogsheads of tobacco were sent from the new world between 1607 and 1750, oh yes, vital information, that.
I learned something just now. Gulag is a word like GeStaPo, a combination of parts of other words meaning "factory labor camp system." Archipelago refers to the isolated labor camps strung across the Societ Union, not to an actual island chain.
It seemed so foreign then, and we felt so lucky.
"Published in the West in '73."
Believe me: I'm hip. Have you ever read a biography of his life? We almost never saw that book. There were two copies of it in existence, and the KGB captured and tortured the woman to whom Solzhenitsyn entrusted one of those copies. (She later killed herself.) They seized that copy, and Solzhenitsyn -- saying that he had no choice -- smuggled the sole remaining copy out to the west.
Yes: it was published in the west in 1973. I graduated high school in 1974, and I knew almost no one who could say they'd heard of it, let alone read it.
It took me another ten years to get to it. Now, I own two copies: my originally annotated paperbacks, and hard cover first editions. (This, along with all of his major fiction: "Denisovich", "Cancer Ward", "The First Circle", and what's been published of the "Red Wheel" series. This is remarkable for me because I almost never have time for fiction, but Solzhenitsyn is not to be missed. Incidentally: I gained important insight to Ayn Rand's literary style, on reading Solzhenitsyn. It was just about the last block of my understanding of her to fall into place. I now deduce that people who moan about her style are provincial imbeciles.)
I repeat: these days, I find it nearly impossible to imagine that any public school would teach anything from that book.
It's way too close to the bone, now.
Someone reading my comments here has asked me about a citation from Vol. III of "Gulag". It's a hard one because the whole work is full of anecdotes of the sort we're looking for. So far, I'm striking completely out.
It has prompted me to think that I should read it all again. The times call for it more than ever.
Anon, what makes you think that the cops didn't call that train back and it couldn't be done. My hunch is they tried to.
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