Wednesday, July 15, 2009

[filming the police] is it a crime or not



What to make of this one? Clearly an old vid, as Samizdata discuss it here in 2007, well before the change in the law in February, 2009.

The Economic Voice also has one at his place. I've read via Google, this Darren Pollard described as 'BNP scum' and elsewhere as 'anti-NWO film-maker'.

He's obviously out to confront the police but I wonder if we can leave him, his party and any other peripheral issues out of it for the moment. He might have been asking for trouble with the megaphone in that central location in TEV's vid but it's difficult to see the justification for the police in the above vid, seeing him filming and coming on to his property for the reasons they did. They might not have liked it but was he breaking a law?

Now if it was a clear breach of an existing law, which the police on patrol should have been expected to have been au fait with, then why was he not immediately arrested?

The fact that they had to step off his property and check on the law and the fact that it took HQ so long to give the answer illustrates one thing. Those two officers came to him, assuming a crime had been committed and that it must have been illegal to film police.

When he asked under which section of the law it was illegal, this stopped them.

The only point I'm making in this post is that they automatically assumed he was committing a crime. If it turned out subsequently that he had breached the law, then why was that law in place in the first place and who promulgated it?

Lastly, look at the attitude of everyone in the vid. Are those two officers your friendly neighbourhood bobbies that used to pound the beat or are they something new - something thuggish? Can one expect anything else in these days of ASBOs and Chavs, of knife crime and civil unrest?

How did the civil unrest get to this stage?

Am I committing a crime by posting this vid of police faces?

Why did they not give their names and numbers when asked?

Is this a happy country?

14 comments:

  1. interesting thought. I well remember the Rodney King riots here. Not taking sides in the matter regarding the actions, because, er, well, it's really not all black and white...

    Will have to get back on this one

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  2. Plod are rapidly climbing the ladder of unpopularity. Pretty soon they will overtake lawyers and take their place as No 2 behind politicians who too the No 1 spot a few years ago.

    And so we are clear. Lawyers have not improved at all. Its down to Plods attitude and actions.

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  3. We should do a post on the most popular and most unpopular. Come to think of it, I might.

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  4. Interesting clip. The government can film civilians everywhere with CCTV, but civilians are not allowed to film the government servants?

    "Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry".
    – Thomas Jefferson

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  5. It is an issue that annoys me.Much of it seems to be down to teh either the ignorance or the arrogance of officers.. That in itself says volumes about their training and management

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  6. Is it just me or did both of these PCs (are they PCs or PCSOs?) look rather dense? There didn't seem to be any spark of intelligence there at all. I seem to remember that a few decades ago you had to have a reasonable education to be a police officer. Now I suppose they'll take anyone. Or perhaps its that our 'all shall have prizes' education system means that people with the right GCSEs are less well educated than before. How very sad. And all because of socialism. A pernicious doctrine if ever there was one.

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  7. Nowadays they could have arrested him under Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008.

    As to whether charges or a conviction would follow...no one has faced either yet.

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  8. I have observed that police are normally quite pleasant even if you are demonstrating. It is when people start getting difficult or there are potential troublemakers around that there attitude changes.

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  9. Cherry.

    You must live on a different planet.

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  10. Anonymous - what experiences have you had with the police apart from seeing it in the media or on YouTube?

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  11. Where to start??

    My findings....many times over....

    General education level.
    Very poor. Where they claim a third level qualification, their detailed knowledge of their subject is superficial, and mainly incorrect. Where they don't have a third level education, their inability to even spell local place names is common-place.

    Inability to hold a brief.

    Anything beyond four paragraphs is lost within the first 2 minutes, their logical thinking is almost always flawed beyond funny, indeed it is tragic. Their responses to events are predictably non-productive at best, at worst, extremely counter productive. Theoretical Problem solving abilities....just forget it!
    General knowledge,... in the bottom 10% in my estimation.

    In their job...
    They milk the system, in court....they lie, brazenly. In many local crimes,...they are culpable, in reaction, ....they are lazy..

    Any project requiring concentration, knowledge, application of non-routine, unpre-planned/taught responses, just forget it, they are pathetically useless.

    Hierarchy-bound, they continually refer, defer, to inferior, time serving seniors, who have learned to seriously play the system. Those time serving seniors, ill educated morons in the main, give a negative overall contribution.

    Do you want any more, or are you happy on your planet???

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  12. OK, best I let the comments speak for themselves.

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  13. Interesting indeed. Cops who don't know the law but use their unifrorm to intimidate- a very dangerous thing.
    I called the police once when a person tried to run my mother over on our private road. The pollice said because it was a private road they coudl do nothing,but when in my home, I quite angrily told them off and that they were useless and accountable if anything happened to my Mother,they threatened to charge me for assualt[for getting angry].
    I pointed out they were in my private home!

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  14. Unfortunately, they don't seem to take that as a factor these days.

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