citizen journalism

PINAC reporter Phillip Turner helped police catch an active shooter at Austin’s SXSW festival while cop watching on the city’s famed Sixth Street Saturday night.
It made for a pair of unlikely allies; a cop watcher seeking to hold police accountable for random acts of wanton violence who wound up capturing a citizen shooting his gun in a crowded area while he recorded with his camera.
If it wasn’t for the assistance of Turner, the police likely wouldn’t have arrested the suspect at all because they didn’t even know what he looked like.

Ramsey Orta, the man who recorded the viral video of Eric Garner’s murder by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo that became the catalyst for the mantra “I can’t breathe” for the national police accountability movement, was arrested on Wednesday while recording a traffic stop.
Orta walked out of his home on March 16 and noticed a New York City police officer conducting the traffic stop, so he pulled up to the scene and started video recording.

 
Austin police went on a pepper spraying rampage Thursday night, pepper spraying a handcuffed man sitting in the back of a police van as well as pepper spraying a pair of women who appeared to have been fighting.
In the first case, the man apparently had been kicking the back of the door after he had been arrested, prompting Austin police officer Cameron Caldwell to open the door and pepper spray him.
“Wow, you asshole,” yelled a woman who had recorded it. “I saw that, I got that on film, you abusive asshole.”

The appetite for brawls and violence at Donald Trump rallies has now landed five North Carolina sheriff’s deputies in hot water.
The Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office demoted two deputies and suspended three this week for not taking action on the white Trump supporter who threw a striking elbow to the face of a young black Trump protester during a rally in Fayetteville on March 10th.

St. Johns County deputies ignored the constitution and followed orders blindly.
They arrested PINAC reporter Jeff Gray this week.

Georgia citizen journalist Nydia Tisdale, who last year won a First Amendment award for fighting for her right to record in public, is now facing five years in prison for recording a Republican political gathering in 2014.
She was arraigned Tuesday on charges of criminal trespassing, misdemeanor obstruction of an officer and felony obstruction of an officer.
She pleaded not guilty.

Co-written with Maya Shaffer
It’s Sunshine Week, the annual national initiative to promote open government and access to public records. Meteorologists have predicted rain and clouds across Massachusetts for the next several days—and the outlook for transparency in the Bay State is equally bleak.

A Florida mayor is saying we should not rush to judgment over a video that is going  viral, showing a Cape Coral police officer running up to a drunk woman arguing with her boyfriend who had taken her keys, then grabbing her and throwing her to the ground.
But the video, recorded early Sunday morning outside of a bar, leaves much to judge the cop on.
In fact, he has since been placed on paid administrative leave, even though his name has not been released.

UPDATE III – March 15th, 3:30pm – Jeff Gray has been released, finally, from St. Johns County Jail.  Here is his statement
“I am out of jail and safely at home. I walked out of jail around 1pm today 3/15/16. I was treated well by SJSO Jail staff. I want to thank everybody for their support and calls to the jail. Word got back to me that the phone lines were melting.”
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A video surfaced this weekend showing fast-talking, southern Georgia cop arresting a college student, just for being the passenger in a car with a broken tail light, after refusing to participate in the cop’s sham “investigation” of a minor traffic infraction.
It would spiral of control in under three minutes.
The cop started the traffic stop by saying, “You’d better step out of the vehicle, ma’am,” to ‘Kaylin’, the properly seat-belted driver – whose name we learned from the video you can see below.