Surveillance Prompts a Suit: Police v. Police – New York Times — OK, here’s the most idiotic example of what’s wrong with American society today. That said, this is out-and-out hilarious.
Mr. Liddy’s complaint about police tactics, while hardly novel from a big-city protester, stands out because of his job: He is a New York City police officer. The rallies he attended were organized in the summer of 2004 by his union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, to protest the pace of contract talks with the city.
Now the officers, through their union, are suing the city, charging that the police procedures at their demonstrations — many of them routinely used at war protests, antipoverty marches and mass bike rides — were so heavy-handed and intimidating that their First Amendment rights were violated.
Found by irony expert Brian McCaffrey
The irony is so thick you could cut it with a knife. When the cops start to complain it’s a pretty good bet that we have gone a little too far down the slippery slope of fascism.
I’ve been in the situation when the number of agencies and individuals recording folks in a demonstration — outnumbered those in the demo. In early days of opposing the VietNam War [in the bowels of Dixie], joining a group outside a draft board to offer our services at beating the Selective Service drones — we encountered 15 different agencies, ranging from Border Patrol to Military [sic] Intelligence, the state Bureau of Investigation to local cops and sheriffs all filming the 7 of us who were there as insurgents!
Ed
That has not been an uncommon event. Did you include any agents provocateur in your seven?
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What would happen if the protesters made a show of photographing the Police et al. Telephoto lenses don’t need to be in their faces but they may be made obvious as to what is being photographed. The rational that the Police are constitutional allowed to photograph the demonstrators should be equally applied to those that are recording the demonstration. Somehow I don’t think that would be allowed to pass unchallenged by the Police though.
One of my “specialties” was turning up finks and provocateurs, paid or otherwise.
During that same tour in the bible belt, the funniest incident was selling an old sawed-off shotgun to a deputy sheriff — who was pretending to be a hip activist of sorts. I knew the gun was legal length — so I didn’t worry about selling it to him.
I also knew the sear was worn to a frazzle and both barrels would go off at once! We figured out he’d held it up next to his head when he test-fired it. Next time we saw him he had a terrific shiner and a welt across his cheek.
Funny…
What goes around, comes around.
Only trouble is, it’s been going on for at least 20 YEARS! ( that’s when I stopped getting “aquainted” with the police, and I ran into it often enough…).
You can’t forget the case of Everyone vs. Everyone.
The next thing you know, NSA agents are going to be complaining that someone’s been reading their e-mail …