Know Your Rights!

A California man with a camera walked up to a pair of illegally parked Bakersfield cops Halloween night, demanding their names and badge numbers, asking what would they do if he had been parking there.
Neither replied as the cop in the drivers seat rolled up his window while Lazaro Lopez continued badgering them with questions.
But then a drunken hero named Ramsey stepped in; a whiny, slurring man who was walking by, telling Lopez to “quit being such a little bitch.”
“These people are fucking protecting you,” Ramsey told him, getting into Lopez’s face.

Not wanting to be recorded in public, a Washington city bus driver attacked a man with a camera Saturday, telling him, “If you take my picture, I’ll fucking lay you out, sonofabitch.”
The driver then stormed up to Scott Shimek with a hand over his face to conceal his identity, invading the photographer’s personal space while telling him, “get the hell away from me, punk.”
He then tried to snatch Shimek’s camera.
Shimek, who was open carrying with a Glock .40 caliber on his belt, told him, “you better get the fuck out of my face.”

October is School Bus Safety Month, which means school bus contractors will go out of their way to show the public that their buses are in compliance with safety standards.
Or more likely, go out of their way to push and shove citizens making these requests out of their office.
That’s exactly what they did to PINAC reporter Jeff Gray this week after he walked into a Student Transportation of America office in Jacksonville, asking to inspect and photograph safety and maintenance records for a particular bus.

Police in Ohio arrested a man in July, claiming he rolled up on them on his bicycle as they were conducting an investigation and began yelling profanities at them.
But now that they’ve released his camera, we can see they lied.
The video shows he only yelled profanities at them after they assaulted him for recording.
We can also see they also lied to him when they told him it was illegal to record a juvenile without parental permission.

Dressed in his Subway uniform, Deonte Lynn had just gotten off work and was walking down the street on his way to return a Redbox movie when he was confronted by an Alabama cop who didn’t like the way he was walking.
At least that’s what the cop said, but Lynn believes he was stopped because he is black.
And it certainly seems that way because the cop was unable to articulate a reasonable suspicion that he had committed a crime.

Americans tend to think of Canadian cops as the kinder, gentler version of the short-tempered, trigger-happy, civil rights violating officers that make up much of the police departments in the United States.
But every once in a while, we are reminded that they can be just as bad.

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.”

After an almost three-month investigation, Rohnert Park officials determined the cop who pulled a gun on a man recording him acted “reasonable” and therefore will not be disciplined.
After all, they said, the cop was doing his due diligence in keeping the neighborhood safe, investigating culprits violating city parking codes, when he came across the man with the camera.

PINAC correspondent Philip Turner was arrested in July for recording police from a public sidewalk. Now, Turner is suing the five officers from the Round Rock, Texas police department who illegally arrested him.

Despite coming up with a novel argument to justify wiretapping charges against Alfredo Valentin, the New Hampshire man arrested in March for recording police as they searched his home, prosecutors were smacked down by a judge in a ruling issued last Wednesday.
“They tried to take the language from Massachusetts law, and they kind of tried to sneak it into New Hampshire law,” said Brandon Ross, Valentin’s attorney.