Texas cops told a man it was against the law to take photos of people’s homes from public property.
Eustace cops were wrong, of course, but we all know cops depend on people being ignorant of the law in order to assert their authority.
In this case, the man knew his rights.
The video was uploaded to YouTube Wednesday by a man named James Meyer, who described it as “my first detainment for having a camera on my neck and walking down the street.”
Meyer is a photographer who apparently is the son of a local firefighter and audio visual technician named Tim Meyer.
This is relevant because at one point in the video, he tries to identify himself to an arriving cop, who apparently is the chief, that he is “Tim’s son.”
Eustace is a town of less than 1,000 people, according to Wikipedia, so apparently everybody knows everybody.
Except the cops didn’t know James, not that it should make a difference.
The cops claimed they were responding to a call of “suspicious activity” – which might sound serious, but it’s vague and holds no concrete grounds for detainment.
“Anytime somebody is around the schools taking pictures, we talk to them,” one cop said.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean the person has any obligation to talk back with them.
The cops went on to tell him that it’s an “invasion of privacy” to photograph people in their front yards from a public street.
And that it’s just better not to take pictures in the direction of their homes anyway, just to be on the safe side.
Meyer admittedly is a rookie when it comes to these audit videos, but he would have done us all a favor had he kept the camera trained on the faces instead of their crotches.
Because it would have been golden to hear them say that is an invasion of privacy.
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