Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up:
In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.
Evidence of police brutality? Show it, and we’ll arrest you, too.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?
Mandos
This doesn’t surprise me: there are lots of people who believe that the cops are the heroes, and cop photographers are DFHs or worse, civil rights agitators. After Dziekański, expect this kind of thing to come to a Canada near you.
Jack Crow
So, recording video of police becomes an act of civil disobedience, then.
Neil
There will be blowback, I’m sure…
North America is not like pre-Nazi Germany
We have a totally different mindset.
Pat
The US is a police state. We’ll need more than cameras to turn it around.
bovineamerica
What the hell is happening to this country? I seriously think that as a collective nation, we are descending into insanity. America has become a country of cowardly boot licking used car salesmen.
Bernard
Nixon’s War on America/Drugs is the mindset that allows this kind of police state. sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Cujo359
I’m just wondering what they’ll do when one of those “security” cameras towns are so eager to install in public areas catch some cops making an arrest. Will they arrest the city council?
Celsius 233
More evidence of a culture lost in the chaos.
Jim
I agree that “making videoing cops illegal doesn’t make the US a police state.” I believe what we are seeing today is part of a very complicated relationship between the State and the economy. A “police state” is much more than one single act of reaction. It is more than two single acts of reaction. I offer this brief summary of a very complicated process as a way of trying to understand the relationship between the State and the economy.
Fascism today is a political response to globalization – capitalism in the age of electronics – and the U.S. battle to dominate the global economy. It is the political expression of the objective concentration of wealth and the spread of poverty. Fascism is not about reaction; that is, returning to some past period. It is a revolutionary political movement that arises in response to a threat to private property relations. It seeks not to adjust this or that policy; that is, to “reform” the system. It seeks to release the capitalists from the restrictions of bourgeois democracy and all that that entails. It seeks the replacement of one State form with another: replacing democracy with the unrestrained rule of capitalist interest and the consolidation and legalization of their openly terrorist dictatorship.
Bernard
whatever you choose to call it, having unchecked police powers starts one act at a time. this is big enough to signal the game is over. technicalities may remain to be fine tuned out later. if this “one” spreads, others are sure to follow.
anonymous
As bad as this is, I don’t think this is “gaining popularity”. I think the police and attorneys general in a few states have taken advantage of the laws in unforeseen ways and are trampling any safeguards put in place for the foreseen areas. But in this country where any reform seems to be a “can’t do”, the effect will be the same.
Personally, I’m getting to the point where I’d like to see all these cops and attorney generals that trash the constitution shot for treason. But it doesn’t take much to imagine how that would end up backfiring too.
opit
It’s hard for me to imagine anyone making a more effective case that corporate America IS fascistic…since the terms corporate government and fascism are synonyms…than Len Hart in his The Existentialist Cowboy blog at Blogger. And yes, I do know about Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolfe. Try these on for size
http://opitslinkfest.blogspot.com/2009/08/police-state.html
http://opitslinkfest.blogspot.com/2010/01/law.html
There’s more. Just check the Topical Index
Len
‘Police States’ are what they do! And one of the things they do is deny the people a voice while seeking to CONTROL information. Video tapes of police officers in the act of abusing people, beating them up, depriving victims of Miranda and others rights OUGHT to be video taped and documented in ANY and EVERY way possible. There is simply no reasonable compromise on this point. Either we are free people with defined rights under the law –or we are not! Which is it? Clearly –the police believe we have no rights and the law means nothing more than the authority that they may ASSUME at the moment! Clearly –people have lost respect for cops else they would not believe it necessary to document police abuse by WHATEVER means!!