Citizens vs. Government

For two grams of marijuana, a Florida SWAT team stormed into a home and shot an unarmed man dead Tuesday, ending a month-long drug investigation on the 22-year-old man they had just killed.
Hillsborough County sheriff’s officials said SWAT team members perceived Levonia Riggins to be an “immediate threat.”
They were also sure to release a previous mugshot, painting him as a man who could not stay out of trouble with the law, even though it had been more than a year since he was last arrested.
However, his friends said he was just a man who enjoyed getting high.

It’s been four days since Chico police arrested a pair of women in Northern California in a video that has gone viral and the story has been reported by at least four local media sites.
However, with the exception of one news site, The Orion, none of those sites have mentioned the fact another phone that recorded the incident has gone missing.

Jonathan Newton was a cop in Georgia when he blew the whistle about misconduct in the department.
He ended up pursuing a law degree from the University of the District of Columbia and launching the National Association Against Police Brutality, which is an organization to combat racism and abuse in police work as well as to protect police whistleblowers.

UPDATE: Wednesday, August 24, 2016, 10:50 p.m.
PINAC reporter Eric McDonough was arrested Wednesday after entering the city council meeting, then being ordered to leave. He was live streaming that part, but they arrested after he had stepped into the parking lot when he had turned his camera off. It appears they are charging him with disorderly conduct, which is a contempt-of-cop charge. He is currently in jail and should be released Thursday.

Keith “Bama Camera” Golden filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Alabama cop who snatched his camera from his hands as he recorded a police station from public, telling him, “I don’t care about your First Amendment rights.”

An Ohio man facing criminal charges for making a satire Facebook page mocking the Parma Police Department got the last laugh last week after he was acquitted by a jury that unanimously decided the page did not violate the state’s felony disrupting public services law.

PINAC reporter Jeff Gray was up to his old tricks again, photographing power plants from public sidewalks, making public records requests at police stations, not breaking any law, when he was approached by cops who accused him of breaking fabricated laws, even going as far as to accuse him of plotting an attack on police.
We’ve seen it all before with Gray; the paranoid cops believing they are keeping the world safe by violating his Constitutional rights, seemingly unconcerned about making fools of themselves on YouTube.

A New York district attorney accused a citizen journalist of stalking a Syracuse police officer by recording him from across the street last week, prompting the cop to walk across the street, punch him in the face and arrest him in a video that ended up going viral.
The only problem is, the evidence on that video does not match the “harassment” charge as it is described in the New York statute.

An Arizona man pulled a state trooper over for speeding in his patrol cruiser at 94 mph down a highway without his police flashers on Tuesday when there was no apparent emergency or specific reason to be speeding.
The cop ended up arresting him.

PINAC correspondent Phillip Turner was on his way to court to fight a petty traffic citation when a Texas state trooper sped past him driving at least 90 mph.
At first, Turner figured he was on his way to an emergency, but the trooper never activated his lights, even when he was tailgating drivers in the fast lane.
Instead, the trooper would tailgate them for several seconds before speeding past them.
That was when Turner decided to pull him over.
“I flashed my lights and honked my horns and after a few minutes, he pulled over,” Turner said.