Know Your Rights!

Oregon police are facing scrutiny on social and news media after a video posted to Facebook last week showed five Ashland police officers piling on top of a homeless autistic man because he had the nerve to inform them they were violating federal law by harassing and ticketing his friend for having a disability service dog in public.
Ashland police charged the man who goes by “Redwood” with disturbing the peace, interfering with an officer and resisting arrest, which are charges commonly used by police in contempt of cop cases across the country.

A Texas woman who stepped out of her apartment to record police trying to enter her neighbor’s apartment ended up assaulted by an officer who claimed he was only doing it for her safety.
Rosenberg police officer Adam Vasquez told her since she was already a victim of assault, he had the right to assault her again.
But the woman, Sydney Tawater, insisted she was not a victim of assault. At least not until she was assaulted by the Texas cop.
She insists she was only trying to record the officers, which is her First Amendment right.

A Florida sheriff’s deputy seized a man’s phone without a warrant after arriving with Department of Children and Families workers to seize a woman’s children, who were also apparently seized without a warrant.
Shortly after they arrived at her Fort Myers home on July 11, the deputy allegedly punched Jasmine Aguilera’s friend, Waldemar Suarez, then spun her around so she wouldn’t witness her children being taken by the state.

An Alabama grand jury refused to bring charges against citizen journalist Keith “Bama Camera” Golden for posting a video of his encounter with the Wetumpka Police Department,  which led to his arrest after hundreds of viewers called the department to complain.

Georgia cops were looking for a man named Michael Clay when they approached a man named Patrick Mumford, ordering him to state his name.
Mumford, who was sitting inside a car parked in a residential front yard minding his own business, was taken aback by the surprise visit from a group of police officers, so he asked why they were asking for his name.
But Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan officer Sharif Lockett made it clear that he was not going to ask again, so Mumford told him his name was “Patrick.”

Mark Hughes is either the unluckiest man in the world or the luckiest, depending on how you look at it.
Unlucky in that we was singled out by the Dallas Police Association as a suspect in Thursday night’s sniper shootings that so far has left five police officers dead and seven wounded, his picture tweeted out to tens of thousands of people in the country, a man considered armed and dangerous.
A man who could have easily been shot and killed by police during their frantic search for a gunman or by anybody else for that matter considering Texas is a very gun-friendly state.

Minnesota resident Philando Castile was two days away from his 33rd birthday when he became the 601th person killed by police this year.

In another example of abuse of power and sheer arrogance, an NYPD officer arrested a man for recording officers from a public sidewalk, accusing him of blocking pedestrian traffic.
It was a lame excuse for an arrest in the nation’s most populated city where congested sidewalks are just a way of life.
The incident took place in 2014 when three NYPD cops were surrounding a man who had passed out on the sidewalk. The man was awake and talking to police when An walked by and began recording.

Co-written with Maya Shaffer
“It is shameful that this is happening in such a progressive state like Massachusetts, which is supposed to value transparency and freedom of information. I believe that nothing short of the threat of legal charges will convince the media relations department of the Boston police to do their jobs. Please do your part to make this happen.”

California police were not satisfied that a man driving through a DUI checkpoint had rolled his window three-quarters of the way down and handed them his drivers license.
No, they wanted the window rolled all the way down, so when he refused, they ordered a tow truck driver to latch on to the car and drive it away from the video of the men recording the stop – while the occupants remained inside – then had the driver use a slim jim to open the driver’s door.
The driver was then arrested on unknown charges, even though he showed no signs of impairment.