Police arrest man for using his cellphone to record them & claim the phone could be a weapon.
CA - San Diego police slapped a cell phone camera out of a man’s hands Saturday, claiming it could be a weapon, before pouncing on him and handcuffing him, lacerating his chin in the process.
Adam Pringle ended up jailed overnight on charges of obstruction because he refused to hand the phone over when the cop ordered him to do so.
But it’s already been established by numerous court cases as well as the U.S. Department of Justice that police do not have the right to take your camera unless it is being used in a commission of a crime.
In this case, Pringle’s only crime was smoking a cigarette on a Mission Beach boardwalk, a violation for which he was already getting cited.
“It is against the law to smoke cigarettes on the boardwalk, so I admit I was breaking the law,” Pringle said in a telephone interview with Photography is Not a Crime Tuesday.
The incident took place at 7 p.m. Saturday evening as Pringle and two buddies were walking on the boardwalk and came across two cops on bicycles who stopped them and started writing Pringle a citation.
It all seemed pretty civil until the cop writing the citation told him to stop recording, which Pringle refused to do.
“Phones can be converted into weapons …. look it up online,” the cop told him.
Last month, a South Florida cop confiscated a man’s phone citing the same reason, so maybe this is a new trend.
When Pringle tried to talk sense into the cop, the cop slapped the phone out of his hand where it fell onto the boardwalk and broke apart.
The other cop then pounced on him, slamming him down on the boardwalk where he ended up with a laceration on his chin.
“Blood was everywhere,” Pringle said. “I was laying on my stomach and he had one knee on my back and the other knee on the side of my face.
“They kept telling me ‘to calm down,’ that ‘you’re making this worse for yourself,’ that ‘you have no right to record us.’”
They hauled him up and marched him to the patrol car, telling his two friends that they would be arrested if they chose to follow.
http://www.photographyisnotacrime.com/2013/04/09/san-diego-police-attack-and-arrest-man-video-recording-them-claiming-phone-could-be-a-weapon/