There is another disturbing account of police reacting abusively to citizens attempting to videotape them in public in an Associated Press account out of Hauppauge, New York. Thomas Demint began filming police who were arresting two of his friends and allegedly body slammed their mother. Dement says that he was tackled by police who took away his smartphone and erased the video. However, they failed to delete the right one. The actual video is below and shows the eight minute encounter. The videotape itself shows how these situations are highly explosive and came be seen from both the perspectives of the police and the citizens in the use of force, including whether the person videotaping was getting too close. The alleged attempted deletion however is another matter entirely.
Dementia can be heard in the video below saying “I’m videotaping this, sir. I’m just videotaping this.” The 20-year-old Long Island college student has filed a complaint. The AP story includes other recent cases.
We have been following the continuing abuse of citizens who are detained or arrested for filming police in public. (For prior columns, click here and here). Despite consistent rulings upholding the right of citizens to film police in public, these abuses continue.
In this case, Chief Kevin Fallon, a Suffolk County police spokesman, declined to comment on Demint’s case but noted “Video is certainly here to stay and people have a right to take video. But they don’t have a right to interfere.”
The videotape captures the complexity of these cases for both police and citizens. The videographer in my view was properly told to step back and seems far too close at points. For most of the time, however, the videographer is at an appropriate distance. The angry confrontation appears to be over concern of the mother who lays on the ground without active medical attention. She then jumps up and runs toward her son and is slammed on the ground by an officer trying to keep them separate. The level of force can be viewed from both the perspectives of the officers (who are trying to control the situation) and the citizens (who are reacting angrily to the lack of medical attention). However, none of that matters. If the police did try to delete the videotape, it should be grounds for termination. There is no valid police purpose or recognized authority for such an act (again if it really did occur).
What do you think?
https://youtu.be/DcdczX7_wvA
Our America.
This is Not a Joke: Black Man Pulled Over For Air Freshener (VIDEO)
Petty cop pullovers reach a new low.
By Adam Johnson / AlterNet
September 4, 2015
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/not-joke-black-man-pulled-over-air-freshener-video?akid=13447.147321.PbxzEI&rd=1&src=newsletter1041930&t=6
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/driving-while-fresh-black-man-pulled-over-by-rhode-island-cop-for-air-freshener-dangling-from-mirror/
randyjet:
“For the life of me, I cannot figure out why the cops would want to delete this. The tape starts out with two people assaulting a cop who is trying to arrest one young man. The mother gets “hurt”, is put on a stretcher, yet can jump off and attack a cop who is trying to restrain one of her sons. Then after she hits the ground again, she goes limp and back to being “hurt”. If I were on a jury trying this, I would put all three people in jail, and find the cops guilty of destroying evidence. This is funny in a pathetic way and these people are trying to milk the system.”
I can’t watch the video, so I can’t comment on whether the mother appeared hurt or not. But if what you described is true, then I completely agree with you. Everyone involved, at some point, did something wrong. Some cops or even departments persist in this futile fight against being filmed in public. They should just assume they have the same privacy, while on duty, as a mega star surrounded by paparazzi, where no embarrassing moment, or bad act, will be immediately filmed and distributed. That’s the reality of policing in the 21st Century.
Interesting Article
Cops Caught on Body Cam Saying “Turn it Off” Before Stomping on Handcuffed Man’s Face
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/cops-turn-body-cams-stomp-suspects-neck/#g6lH2R83DFuTFBIL.99
Tampering with evidence, isn’t that a felony?
People have a right, if not duty, to observe and testify. Videotaping is precisely that.
Police who function in the public and who don’t want to be videotaped should not apply for the job.
Citizens must obey the law to comply with THE LAW and the orders of police.
Bystanders who videotape police should be silent and not obstruct or distract police.
The ultimate responsibility is that of the police management. Vetting, proper training and inspection of the product management deploys in the field precludes these anomalies.
The woman in this video demonstrates the failure of affirmative action as the police unit compensates for her physical inadequacy, assigning physical duties to males. The female receives equal pay for an inferior contribution to the mission due to that inadequacy.
In the video, she cowers and keeps her distance, finally hesitantly providing the handcuffs. Almost no females would be deployed alone confidently by management.
In the area of firefighting, the physical inadequacy of affirmative action females is more obvious.
Affirmative action is not only antithetical, unconstitutional and unintelligent, it is dangerous.
“The police continue to be intentionally misleading about their rhetoric and openly hostile to anyone who questions them. It’s a profession that refuses any attempts for accountability and justice.” -from the linked article, below
“2015 may be one of the safest years for law enforcement in a quarter century”
“The US is on pace for 36 non-accidental, firearm-related police fatalities in 2015, which would be the lowest total in 25 years, aside from 2013”
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/04/police-deaths-2015-law-enforcement-safety
Despite urgent warnings from police and others about a “war on cops” allegedly linked to the Black Lives Matter protest movement, statistics show 2015 is in fact shaping up to be one of the safest years for law enforcement in a generation.
According to the Officer Down Memorial Page (ODMP), which keeps data on officer deaths going back over 100 years, 24 officers have been shot and killed by suspects this year. This puts the US on pace for 36 non-accidental, firearm-related police fatalities in 2015. Each one of such deaths is a tragedy for the officers killed, their families and the communities they serve, but this would be the lowest total in 25 years, aside from 2013 which saw 31 such deaths.
A series of recent high-profile police deaths has sparked much of the rhetoric tying violence against police to anti-police-brutality protesters. On Friday, Harris County sheriff’s deputy Darren Goforth was gunned down from behind while filling his car at a gas station. The suspect, Shannon Miles, was arrested shortly thereafter and charged with capital murder. Miles has a history of severe mental illness and was found mentally incompetent to stand trial in 2012.
Neither Miles, nor any other person suspected of killing a police officer in 2015, has claimed affiliation with the Black Lives Matter movement or any related organization. Still, the attempt to make a connection has persisted as people work to make sense of the senseless killing.
…
But misinformation also abounds.
In response to the Fox Lake shooting, state representative Barbara Wheeler, whose district includes the small Illinois town, issued a statement that said: “Eleven police officers have needlessly lost their lives since 20 August alone in America because of shootings.” The statistic, which was then quoted by several media outlets, appears to be untrue. According to ODMP, that number is actually four.
…
Reached for comment, a spokesperson at representative Wheeler’s office told the Guardian that the statistic probably came from the Fox Lake chief of police, but could not be sure.
Inaccurate information has been present in the alleged “war on cops” since as early as December 2014 when a Fox affiliate station in Baltimore manipulated video of chants by protesters against “killer cops” to make it sound as though they had chanted “kill a cop” instead. Two staff members involved in producing the segment were later fired, and the network apologized.
….
Unlike the shooting in Harris county, which was by all accounts carried out like an execution, the vast majority of the incidents in which police were shot dead in 2015 were instead tragically typical law enforcement situations in which officers were engaged with violent suspects, and were struck in an exchange of gunfire. Only one other police death this year, the killing of New Orleans Housing Authority patrolman James Bennett as he sat in his patrol car on 24 May, seems to closely resemble the killing of deputy Goforth in Texas. No arrests have been made yet in the case – it is the only cop killing of 2015, besides Fox Lake without a suspect either in custody or dead.
Most police officers killed this year instead died in incidents more similar to officer Henry Nelson of Sunset, Louisiana, who was allegedly killed by Harrison Riley Jr while intervening in a domestic dispute.
Peter Guidry, the assistant chief of the very small Sunset department said he wasn’t sure what caused the shooting yet but that “it had nothing to do with protests; it’s just a tragic incident”. Nelson and Riley were actually cousins and the list of officers killed this year are full of tragic coincidences like this.
Wisconsin state trooper Trevor Casper, 21, was on his very first solo shift since graduating the police academy when he was shot and killed intervening in a bank robbery. Omaha police officer Kerrie Orozco was shot on her last shift before going on maternity leave, when she was killed on a taskforce trying to take a fugitive into custody. The killers of both officers also died in the exchange.
DeRay Mckesson, one of the most visible leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement said these attempts to forge a connection between police deaths and protesters is merely part of ongoing efforts to discredit the movement. “The police continue to be intentionally misleading about their rhetoric and openly hostile to anyone who questions them,” Mckesson said. “It’s a profession that refuses any attempts for accountability and justice.”
If we truly have a right to video these police encounters we need enforcement of laws already on the books, or a new law that clearly spells out the right of the citizenry to video. We’ve heard so many cases of police destroying video or attacking people who are documenting the interactions of police with the populace, but have we ever seen any cops punished for such actions? Also knowing what happened prior to this confrontation of the mother ans sons would be helpful.
The only thing the police did wrong, besides trying to erase the video, was slamming the woman to the ground. It was done consciously and slowly enough to have been pulled back a bit. Instead the officer went through the move to create as much impact as possible. That was unnecessary.
Maybe someone here can tell me what this has to do with Black Lives matter?
Other than to, perhaps, contrast the fact that no black people would live through such abusing of a cop?
I am with Liberaltarian. It is destruction of evidence. They need to be charged. That is usually a felony.
Destruction of evidence is a crime. Termination from their jobs is too lenient.
The police didn’t just try to wipe out the recording; they arrested Demint and charged with obstruction of justice because he “interfered with officers by shouting obscenities toward police officers and paramedics as well as entering the scene several times after he was told not to.” Is it now a crime to swear at police officers?
Attempted deletion of video should lead obstruction of justice charges.
If I were to follow typical prosecutorial practices, I would stack assault under color of law, assault, and battery charges on top.
I am sure that the more imaginative of you can think of at least another 1/2 dozen charges that we would face in similar circumstances if the situation were reversed and a civilian attempted to delete a cop recording.
Based on the video I see an obnoxious group consisting of a mother and her sons. It appears the mother seems to be acting and the sons are agitated and interfering and one is threatening the police. I would like to know the story from the beginning from both sides. I do not know the police protocols, but it did not feel as if they did anything wrong, aside from the deletion of video.
The public neither trusts nor respects police. Guns don’t generate respect. They generate resentment.
It seems that many of the folks police stop have learning disorders such as these folks who can’t seem to come up with any language other than profanity.
The problem is in addressing the ubiquitous challenge of low functioning people.
For the life of me, I cannot figure out why the cops would want to delete this. The tape starts out with two people assaulting a cop who is trying to arrest one young man. The mother gets “hurt”, is put on a stretcher, yet can jump off and attack a cop who is trying to restrain one of her sons. Then after she hits the ground again, she goes limp and back to being “hurt”. If I were on a jury trying this, I would put all three people in jail, and find the cops guilty of destroying evidence. This is funny in a pathetic way and these people are trying to milk the system.
“PIGS IN A BLANKET, FRY THE BACON!” BLM chant in Minneapolis. Now, I have said here MANY times cops need to come to terms w/ the ubiquity of cameras. They are going kicking and screaming into that reality. I have also said, I don’t trust many cops. But, I don’t trust many attorneys either.
The entire scene seems like police officers overreacting. Let’s face it police officers who believe they are acting properly don’t want to destroy the video they want to keep it. None of us are safe.