1st Amendment Audit

Two California men who spent seven months in jail for conspiracy to commit murder based on rap lyrics and Facebook photos that made no reference to actual murders filed a lawsuit against the San Diego Police Department Tuesday.
Police based their arrests on allegations that Brandon Duncan and Aaron Harvey were Facebook friends with suspected gang members they grew up with, using an obscure law that does not ever appear to have been used in California before the 2014 arrests.
But there was no evidence that either committed any murders or were actual gang members.

The South Carolina town of Greer has doubled down on their police department’s blatant constitutional violations, but not how you’d expect.
The City of Greer released a body cam video-  which you can see below- where the first officer on the scene admits that the man they arrested wasn’t doing anything wrong when they rolled up and started asking for identification – without a state law enabling them to conduct a “stop and identify.”

Videotaping and photography are constitutionally protected free speech, but in South Carolina, a few police think free speech is a crime.
“What crime have I committed?” asked the citizen journalist recording video in the back of a municipal city center’s parking lot in Greer, South Carolina.
Quickly and thoroughly, the South Carolina cops were about to violate that citizen journalist’s 1st, 4th, 5th and 6th Amendment rights, all in one short video which you can see below.

I was taking photos of a sign outside the Homestead city council meeting in South Florida this month when a police officer named John Edward Frank informed me that I was forbidden from taking his photo – even though I had no interest in photographing him in the first place.
So I started video recording him instead.
What else did he expect considering I was wearing my Photography is Not a Crime t-shirt?

“You’re about to go to jail for being a dumb-ass,” said a Houston Federal Agent Calderon to PINAC citizen journalist David Warden.
Boy, was he wrong.
The Houston Federal Court Security Agent assaulted PINAC correspondent David Warden when he lawfully recorded outside of a Federal Courthouse on its sidewalk.
Just three minutes after Warden began recording in the video below which is going viral, a Federal “Court Security Agent” assaulted the citizen journalist on a public sidewalk, while demanding his identification.

Los Angeles Police Department detained and handcuffed a man for filming in public near LAPD’s Mission police station.
The citizen journalist tells the officers in the video you can see below on several occasions, that he is engaged in constitutionally protected activity.
Then, LAPD cops kept questioning him for recording video.
And spoke nothing of reasonable suspicion that Scott would commit a crime.
Because the police would be the only offenders in this video.

A man who was standing on a public sidewalk outside of a military base in San Diego was told he was breaking federal law by photographing the entrance to the base.
“You are on my property,” said the United States Marine Corps military police officer, who walked more than 100 feet outside the base to confront him.
But the man, who posted his video on YouTube under the username The Junkyard News, insisted he was not breaking any law.

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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One of our favorite law enforcement officers – perhaps our all-time favorite officer – passed away Sunday, saddening those in the law enforcement community as well as those of us in the PINAC community.
Lieutenant Robert Guthrie of the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office in Southern Georgia suffered a stroke as a result of his long-term battle with high blood pressure.
He was airlifted to a Jacsksonville hospital on Friday and was placed on life support.
On Sunday, he was pronounced dead. 

Claiming their precinct had come under recent terrorist threats and destructive acts of vandalism, a group of Milwaukee police officers surrounded a man standing outside their building with a camera, telling him they had the right to detain him for a warrant check for “safety reasons.”
“In light of things that have happened recently, it just kind of raises our suspicion,” said a cop who identified himself as “Officer Miller.”
“I have no malicious intent,” assured the videographer, who goes by Superrick568 on YouTube.