Bad Cop, No Donut

A Miami mother caught on camera in a heated debate with a Police officer near her daughter’s school in October, just had all charges dropped on Tuesday.
Rita Guzman from Cutler Bay, Florida told CBS news that she feels “just relief” and wants to put the horrific incident behind her.
The Miami-Dade state attorney office headed by longtime prosecutor Kathleen Fernandez-Rundle published the following memo about Guzman’s case:

The Los Angeles Police Department is facing legal action for shooting an unarmed man in the head and leaving him with a collapsed skull, blindness and crippled.
Walter DeLeon waved a towel in his hands to flag down help in his neighborhood, when he encountered the two officers last summer.
DeLeon exchanged a few words and was quickly shot by LAPD officer Cairo Palacios on a Friday evening.
The horrifying and bloody viral video first posted to twitter on June 19th, 2015 by a witness.

As I dive deeper and deeper into the legal complexities of the right to photograph and record in public (I can quote Glik v Cuniffe so fast I will make your head spin), I have noticed a disturbing trend:
The reasons and excuses offered by police officers, firefighters, security officers, even teachers and principals, to keep you from taking a photograph are just plain pathetic.

A free speech chilling memo by the general counsel for a Florida police department advises cops that they can choose when to arrest citizens who record them in public, if those officers happen to be working undercover.

A photojournalist who photographed Chicago police abusing a protesters during the 2012 NATO Summit, only to be beaten up himself by police, received a $100,000 settlement last month.
Joshua Lott, who was on assignment for Getty Images, said police destroyed one of two of his cameras as they stomped on him and beat him with batons.
He was jailed for misdemeanor reckless conduct, a charge that was dismissed when the cops failed to show up to court.

In life, there are questions which – no matter how many times you ask – simply cannot be answered. Who shot JFK?? Did men really walk on the moon?? Is there a God??
But when the question involves your civil liberties and possibly being arrested for taking photographs, there should be a clear-cut answer.
Our question for today is direct:

Two more Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies were sentenced to prison today after a federal judge refused to give them leniency because of their law enforcement status.
Deputy Sussie Ayala received a six-year sentence while deputy Fernando Luviano received a seven-year sentence.

NFL critic Tamiko Grimes was exonerated of all charges stemming from a dubious arrest at SunLife Stadium by Miami-Dade County police caught on a video that went viral in September, seen below.
She’s the wife of Miami Dolphins Pro Bowl cornerback Brent Grimes.

A Florida Highway Patrol officer did not appreciate PINAC’s Jeff Gray from photographing and recording the scene of a single motorcycle accident Friday, ordering him away from what he called “my crime scene.”
But the cop did not say a thing to the woman who rode her bicycle right through the scene.
And Gray did not even cross the street as the woman did.
But he did not have a camera, so that made all the difference in the world.

It took Chicago Police over a year to release the video of Laquan McDonald. If a video is recorded and nobody sees it, then does the recording matter?
What if there wasn’t a whistleblower, a reporter and a lawyer who combined to sue on behalf of the public interest and gain release of the video depicting an officer shooting the teenager McDonald as he walked away from cops.