Veteran NYTimes Photographer Arrested & Allegedly Beaten by NYPD
blog.chasejarvis.com
blog.chasejarvis.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/07/nyregion/for-women-in-stre...
stop-and-frisk is a significant issue in NYC. Ostensibly the authority is granted as part of a larger effort to eliminate firearms on the street. It resulted in nearly 700K stops in 2011. That got 800 some-odd guns off the streets of the city at an unknown cost to goodwill (given most people stopped-and-frisked are Black or Latino).
On the flip side there is no doubt that stop-and-frisk has contributed to one of the highest rates of marijuana arrests in the country for NYC. Odd, given New York state effectively decriminalized small amounts of weed in the 70's. It's only through a loophole that states publicly displaying the drug makes possession an arrestable offense and it's been reported that the NYPD consistently instructs people in stop-and-frisk situations to remove any drugs from their pocket and present it for inspection prior to frisking, making it publicly displayed.
Gov. Cuomo called on NY state legislature this year to eliminate the public display issue, but nothing happened before the end of the January-June session.
edit: added "small amounts"
That's really interesting. Are you saying that if an officer finds marijuana, instructs you to remove it, and you refuse, you can't be arrested because you didn't display it publicly?
And then realise it's the people enforcing the law who are breaking it. Even if it isn't illegal, no chance they'd enforce that.
A while ago a family was flying out to visit their home in Africa and carrying a large amount of cash. When asked how much they had they said something like "About $4,000" and the agent they were talking to said that the estimate was fine and instructed them to write that down. When they got further in, though, another agent insisted that the money be counted and when it came out a bit higher than was written down used this as an excuse to seize the money. After a lengthy court battle, though, the family got the money back.
With the government, you know that money came from some hardworking individual who paid his taxes ... and the only reason you have it is because some corrupt piece of garbage was drawing a salary on that money and you ended up being his victim.
Not how I want to live my life and certainly not something I want to be reminded of every time I take out my wallet.
(Would be an interesting scenario.. individual officers elected on popular vote..)
Either way, 'you can beat the rap but not the ride'.
How on God's green earth are these searches "reasonable" under the Constitution?
I'm not a big one for "racism" or class analysis but there is no, no way a cop would try this on me, middle-class white guy, walking down the street. If he did I'd give him grief. I'd end up complying, but I'd look him in the eye and say "I've got your badge number. I've got your partner's badge number. Go ahead, take me in. This shit is writing up and you are going to be in paperwork on this for the next six months. I'll call my lawyer, you call your union rep 'cause he'll be working this for a while." And he knows, I've got the free time and the entitlement attitude and am sufficiently pissed off to go after him. And he knows the city council and the mayor's office won't just ignore me, that IAD will have to look into it.
At the end of the day I won't be able to touch him -- the union and the blue line will keep him from serious harm -- but it's going to be a hassle for everyone and it makes him less promotable / supportable in the future. And God only knows what else might get turned up.
All in all, a cop needs a _reason_ to frisk me, and if he hasn't got one he's going to pay a price, maybe just a nuisance, but maybe a high one. But he can bust on some black lady because, hey, maybe she's got a gun, and no one cares enough to listen to her complain.
And I don't want to hear this crap about a cop's safety. It is a tough, tough job and that's why I respect guys with badges. I would never do anything to make a cop's job harder. But if you are to claim safety as an excuse for violating my rights -- fuck you. That kind of "safety" looks a hell of a lot like the government dominance the Bill of Rights is supposed to prevent. You wanna be safe, be an actuary. Don't put on a uniform and expect me to treat you like a hero while you get nervous because someone _might_ have a gun.
I seriously do not understand why this stop and frisk thing is constitutional. If I had to put up with it I'd be pissed off too. Every time they do this they are telling people they are crap, they aren't citizens the way white guys like me are. Their gun hit rate is 0.12%! That isn't police work, that's a gang letting everyone know who's boss.
In 2011, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 685,724 times.
605,328 were totally innocent (88 percent).
350,743 were black (53 percent).
223,740 were Latino (34 percent).
61,805 were white (9 percent).
341,581 were aged 14-24 (51 percent).
Again, not that it'd likely ever happen, but hey, petitioning your elected representatives never (okay, rarely) hurt.
However, his union is now paying for his defense.
> I was taking pictures of something that was really wasn’t anything shocking for them. There was no police line. Ive been doing this a long time and its frustrating. Im credentialed. They asked for the credential, I’m shooting, the next thing I know I’m in jail and my equipment is confiscated.
Serious question: Why does/should it matter that he is credentialed?
Let's call it for what it is... the police were enjoying watching the fight and didn't want to be disturbed. What happened to the girl or rather the attacker? nothing, the justice was instead leveled at Stolarik, and what's he going to do back, nothing. What a shit hole NYC must be. (I might be wrong too)
The reason HN is interesting is not that it has unique submissions--it mostly doesn't--but that it has consistently insightful commentary. It makes sense to bring up topics like this here rather than Reddit simply because of the resulting discussions.
Also, my impression is that HN has always been disproportionately libertarianish. In fact, in my experience, this is true of the tech and startup communities in general. So I don't think this is a particularly new development.
I love reading HN comments on tech news/debates/articles because I know there's going to be a huge depth and breadth of different commenters' experiences and anecdotes. This generally isn't true with regards to political/social stuff, where the vast majority of commenters have the same belief and experience.
That being said, I don't really mind the submissions -- because they're easily identifiable -- I just hope they aren't signals of a larger trend towards generalism. (Reddit, too, used to be predominantly tech/programming articles.)
If submissions to nothing more than image macros ever get popular, then it's time to jump ship because HN has become way too much like Reddit.
You can't simply introduce more social-justice type articles and expect the rest of HN to stay the same. This is why I recommend sticking with the site guidelines: if it would be covered on TV news (this would!) it doesn't belong here, unless it's evidence of some new phenomena (this isn't!)
If this bothers you, good. It should.
Innovative technologies are disruptive, and those behind the disruption generally look down on monopolies with antiquated products. Given the pace of change, sometimes we as the disruptive become the disrupted.
For example, if you are creating an app that records sound or images, you would want to be aware of the risks to camera users. Especially if that camera is less obvious than the camera used by the photographer in this story. The law seems to be on the side of the photographer but the realities are complex.
This is covered under the HN guidelines, as the intersection between technology, privacy, and civil liberties is definitely an interesting new and ongoing phenomenon.
Total non-sequitur. I'm not saying I think this is a good HN article to upvote but the idea that this is somehow going to exclude everything else is bizarre.
Many people here, myself very much included, get their social justice stories in a different section of their RSS readers. It's not that those stories aren't interesting; it's that they simply aren't Hacker News, any more than updates about Girl Talk albums are Hacker News because hackers are so likely to listen to them.
Change can come in many forms, including social. Such stories are a record of social change, and the pressures that drive it.
Let's be honest: this story is here because it makes people angry. It's the kind of story that you'd get as an email forward from your aunt. It gets attention and stirs up emotion. It does not gratify one's intellectual curiosity.
CJ: Do you feel your rights were violated?
RS: Of course, but you have to realize that each situation each different. Just because we have this constitutional right doesn’t give us a complete right to do whatever we feel like doing. This needs to be understood. You can’t just stand your ground, in the middle of a police scene, and say, “Its my right to shoot this.” You have to walk carefully every time you show up to a [police] scene. There’s a lot involved. These police officers are trying to do a job too. Everyone needs to understand that. I always try to respect that.
CJ: For the benefit of those photographers up in arms about your situation, can you explain what you mean by “respect”?
RS: You want to be respectful of the police officers space as well. We need to be conscious of our surroundings. Even as we’re protected by our constitutional rights – this is important [as photographers] to remember. However, in this case, there is no question that what I was doing was right. I’m never the one to say the picture is more important than everything else on the scene. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for “standing my ground”, and an officer is in the middle of doing his job and [because of interfering] and an officer gets injured as a result of what I chose to do. Just because I have the “right” do take photos. I would never do that. And that is kind of what the police are saying about me. That they have the “right” to charge me with obstruction of government administration. They are using that to say, ‘we can do whatever we want.’ It’s unfortunate because I’m the one who was totally abused.
I'm scared of slippery slopes of Mount Reddit as well, but this is an article worth reading.
This isn't "fuck the police", this is "be responsible, be respectful, be polite, know your rights"
Some of us are building or contemplating building products that make use of those smart phone features. If such activity is likely to result in police brutality directed at our customers, that is worth knowing.
Technology impacts the real world. How and where our technology touches society in general is worth understanding.
Most of everyone does, though. That doesn't make it HN material. I'd wager that most of us brush our teeth, but I don't think that an article about toothbrush sales should be posted here.
Woah, woah, woah! Let's try to be realistic here!
I don't want to sound like an idiot spouting zen koans but you really have to be aware of major trends to be able to navigate around them or even perhaps change them. The clash between technology and authority is a very interesting one.
The individual, the mob and the government are all empowered differently by each new advance.
He goes to a great lengths to tell this as "nothing to see here, move along.."
Now why would he do that?
My theory on this is that in the past he didn't have to contend with pain in the ass bystanders doing the same thing that he did. Those amateurs are now making it increasingly difficult for a professional like him to do his job.
As a result he wants to send a message out there for fear that if he doesn't his rights will be restricted as a result of others behaviors. It's a little "last man over the bridge".
The other possibility of course is that he has something to hide. He doesn't want to stir the hornets nest for fear that something will happen to him and he wants to keep a low profile by ending this as soon as possible.
His equivocation was intended to head off the "police are all nazis because one of them took my camera and arrested me when I was in the middle of a crime scene and interfering with the police" attitude that's all too common. He pointed out that there is a line between responsible documentation of events, and interference, and that line is crossed sometimes, and people criticize the police anyway, and that's not right.
Has nothing to do with those of us making that tech at all. You're right.
To put it another way, how useful is the right to read the source if one does not have the right to free speech, assembly, religion (or lack there of), and petition for redress of grievances.
To be even more blunt, the Magna Carta Libertatum is under attack.
I have more computers in my house than cameras, but only barely.
"I want my work to become part of our visual history, to enter our collective memory and our collective conscience. I hope it will serve to remind us that history's deepest tragedies concern not the great protagonists who set events in motion but the countless ordinary people who are caught up in those events and torn apart by their remorseless fury. I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated."
"I used to call myself a war photographer. Now I consider myself as an antiwar photographer."
"There is a job to be done...to record the truth. I want to wake people up!"
Doesn't sound impartial to me.. and Nachtwey is no noob, to put it mildly. Embedded or not, anyone calling themselves photojournalist ought to learn from him and others.
People who can remain impartial in the face of suffering or abuse of power aren't being professional, they're being sociopaths. It takes a strong, big heart to not be impartial and still do the job, sure. It's not for everybody. So what. Lead, follow or get out of the way :P
Of course I am not saying everyone in NYPD is like that, and I have seen and known my own share of great individuals who works for NYPD. But generally speaking they are pretty bad, they have this attitude that they are above law and more often than not they get away with doing almost anything.
As to why LAPD and NYPD are famous, that must be probably because these two cities have incidents that are worth national/international discussion. If you start reading more local US news, they usually mention which police department is involved in the case, like the county head or State attorney, etc.