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Stopped By Cops In Red Hook
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I was walking around Red Hook, and wandered down past the Playground, where the soccer games are usually played on the weekends. I was trying to get a good shot of what appears to be an abandoned Port Authority building, down at the end of what I believe was Court Street, past Halleck.
There's an oil storage facility down at the end of the block, and as it turned out, the oil tanks totally blocked out my view of the building that I wanted, but as I was walking back, I noticed a cop car at the end of the street, at the intersection of Halleck and Court, where I'd come from a few minutes ago.
As I walked back up Court, they turned and drove towards me, and as we met, the officer in the driver's seat called me over and started questioning me. What was I taking pictures of? Why? What reason did I have for taking pictures, and of course, finally, do I have ID?
I told them that I was a photographer and that I was simply wandering around the neighborhood, taking pictures of various random things, and I even told them that even though I hadn't taken any pictures near or of the oil tanks, I had gone down to try and get an angle for the abandoned buildings behind them.
I gave them my license, and after looking at it for a minute, the officer in the driver's seat took out a pad, and started writing all of my information down.
When I questioned her as to why she was recording my information, I got the standard "9-11" answer.
Now, I don't have a problem with them patrolling near a potentially sensitive area, and to some extent, I don't have a problem with them stopping to talk to me, but when they start taking down information, and then doing who-knows-what with that info, without any sort of context, or additional information regarding the fact that the only reason why they stopped me in the first place wat that I had a camera near some oil tanks (unless they're stopping and taking down all the names and addresses of people taking pictures around the UN, the ESB or the reservoir in Central Park, since the last time I checked, those are "potential targets too), then I really have a problem with this practice.
When is this encroachment on our civil liberties, driven by this irrational and rampant paranoia, going to stop?
Posted at 9:21AM, 22 June 2009 PDT
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Good question, and not one I suspect is going to be answered definitively any time soon. There are hundreds of threads all over Flickr on this exact topic, and over here in the UK some absolute horror stories of innocent photographers, including tourists, being treated like terrorists. The good thing, I suppose, is that it is a live issue and hopefully those 'in authority' are aware they are treading on toes.
boingboing.net/2009/01/11/another-london-photo.html
is just one of thousands of examples...
Posted 36 months ago.
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in response to your question, when will it stop, when we stop letting it happen, acknowledging the cop was the first mistake, until the cops learn the actual laws, ignore them.
Posted 36 months ago.
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Bad advice . . .
Posted 36 months ago.
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I've written the NYCLU regarding this, giving them pretty much the whole outline. Maybe they'll chime in.
I'm willing to stand up to protect my rights within the law, but I'd like to know exactly what my rights are before asserting them with cops.
I suspect that this will not be my last encounter, and each encounter is a lesson learned.
I know that the UK has a far worse situation than we have here in the States, but that's small comfort when your civil liberties are being encroached upon.
Posted 36 months ago.
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The ACLU has a document about what to do when you are stopped by the police.
Know Your Rights: What to Do If You're Stopped by the Police (7/30/2004)
But the easiest thing is to cooperate and follow the advice on the ACLU page. Forcing the police to detain you is not a good option.
Posted 36 months ago.
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Thanks Paul. I've read that page already, and the part that I'm not clear on is state-specific, so I'd want some further clarification.
Posted 36 months ago.
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I could be wrong, but I seem to remember a lot of signs down there warning that the area was US Coast Guard property, and picture taking was frowned upon. It could be why you got the extra hassle. Ignoring the police is the dumbest thing to do. For one thing, it actually is against the law, and gives them an excuse to turn the hassle factor way up. Even if nothing comes of it long term, it can give them an excuse to lock you in a cell for 24 hours. Longer if it's late on a Friday. The best thing to do is cooperate, then take it up with a higher authority later.
Posted 36 months ago.
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Similar things have happened to me, including one nearly identical incident near a Con Edison substation on the Lower East Side on Easter Day 2004. I was walking on the sidewalk and taking some pictures (and only for a short time), and two cops pulled up and started asking questions. They asked me for my ID, and I declined to provide it. I mostly asked them if I was free to leave repeatedly until they gave up and let me go.
I called the precinct afterward and asked what the rationale was for such a stop, and they said it was covered by the PATRIOT Act. Which I then downloaded and read everything I could find in it that was related to photography. There was nothing particularly relevant.
Oh, and when I was stopped the cops told me there were signs posted that photography was not permitted. I asked them to show me the signs, but they were unable to do so and changed their line to something about how there should have been or used to be signs, but that perhaps they had been removed by mistake.
Bollocks.
Originally posted 36 months ago.
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John Zwinck edited this topic 36 months ago.
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I was stopped by two of New York's Worst in December of 2007 for taking pictures of them(from a distance) and of the crowds and windows at Macy's in Herald Square. These two were the cliche goony coppers that give decent, reasonable Police Officers a bad name.
Recently I had a nasty encounter with a high ranking cop who, even before I came up to him and his two similarly decorated companions, threatened to destroy my camera if I dared to take his picture. This was at the Brooklyn Memorial Parade in Fort Hamilton. I do wish I had thought to get his badge number. He was outright vicious. I told him I was going to ask him like I normally would most officers that wanted a portrait of. He just exploded at me for sick reason. A shame because the three of them decorated in Dress Uniforms would been a perfect image.
I've had better experiences with the NYPD horse patrol Officers and several Police Officers that I had a genial conversation with before taking a group picture of them at the Veggie Pride Parade last year.
There's always a few ignorant bad apples that spoil the bunch. However if signs are clearly posted barring photography one should respect them. If not then the law is vague and if you happen to run across the wrong officer at the wrong time you're in for a hassle at the least.
Originally posted 36 months ago.
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ⓅⒶⓎⓅⒶⓊⓁ edited this topic 36 months ago.
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Whenever I see police officers, I just keep my camera away, I pretend to put it in my bag until they are gone. I just don't want to waste my time with some of these obnoxious NYPD. Also, I completely agree with you, I think there are other places that has a higher percentage of being a "terrorist" hotspot than an abandoned old building.
Posted 36 months ago.
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well, it's a sad state of affairs we live in where the simple act of taking a photograph is such a hassle and a big deal.
though you must keep in context a few things; Cops are like MOST other people, lazy. They don't decide to find you taking pictures near a building for no good reason. The reason they approached you might be more with the post 9-11 world we live in and less of them ball busting. in your post you explain that you were photographing near an OIL STORAGE facility. an oil storage facility that houses highly combustable oil. A serious conscern even if you don't believe it is.
More over in my profession, I have the "pleasure" of listening to quite a few 911 calls both from a caller perspective and a policemans radio perspective. I can tell you this much if someone's walking accross the bridge with a camera in their hand or near the local BP gas station some whacked out person on the street thinks it's Bin Ladden's messanger gathering information for the next attack and frantically calls it in, which the local police car must check out.
Also, OFTEN grafitti artists bring cameras along with them hen they go to do graffitti and take pics of their work, or come back a few days latter with the camera to do it.
As for writing down your information. it goes on a paper which goes into a computer system that is used for nothing else other then telling the age and race of a person stopped so that the Al Sharptons of the city can scream the cops are racist. it;s really not much of a conscern. it;s not tracked or used for any other purpose.
Try and give your local cops a break when they deal with you, they may not want to be doing it in the first place. The real ones to blame are terrorists and other assorted losers who give them a reason to have to look into it in the first place. Yeah, you don't want to be hasseled, but so many of us with the cameras don't realize cops dont ant to be hasseled either and the ones we should be blaming are the losers who are the reason we have to go thru it in the first place.
Originally posted 36 months ago.
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ltrev79 edited this topic 36 months ago.
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I think in NY that you would be hard put to be taking a photograph anywhere at all, that couldn't be interpreted by a zealous officer (or a random busybody) as a potential 'terrorist target'.
In the midst of all this self-perpetuating paranoia, I wonder if there has been - anywhere in the western world, since 9/11 - a documented case where someone has been arrested, charged, tried and convicted of openly taking photographs in a public place, with the aim of aiding terrorism? If there has been, I feel sure we would have heard about it before now. But in all the stuff I've read and seen on the subject of photographers rights vs national security, I've never seen such a case cited. Has anyone else?
Originally posted 36 months ago.
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1hr photo edited this topic 36 months ago.
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1hr, That's because the majority of cases are not publicized or tried in standard criminal courts. Instead they're tried in FISA courts, There are cells out there trying to test the waters and do surveliance on us. I get training on the subject regularly and in those trainings they show us photos, video and other examples of that surveilance as it's taken from the apprehended people. It's kept low key intentionaly, firstly to keep people feeling safe and keep the economy going and secondly to help discourage the people making the plans from learning how we discovered them in the first place. In fact if you're ever curious about some of the incidents, look into a book called "Jihad in Brooklyn" it;s about how the NYPD ESU unit took out a bomb making facility in brooklyn a few years before 9-11. The NYPD's Counter terrorism unit is larger then most whole police departments, and it is so for a reason, they're very busy.
But either way you're missing the point of what I'm saying, no, not every photographer is a terrorist, and yes there are several areas in and around NY that are targets, I'm not disputing any of that. I'm saiying, we as photographers often get bent at the cop who tells us to move, when it aint his idea, it's the busy body and the boss telling him to go move you. try not to give him a hard time, he's just doing his job. get bent at the terrorists who panick the people on the streets, and the people on the streets who call 911 at the sight of a camera and a guy with a mustache, not the cop who has the crappy job of responding to it
Posted 36 months ago.
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 ltrev79,
So they're just following orders, is that your argument?
I'm sorry, but that just does not cut it.
In situations like mine and hundreds of others, both in NYC and in other places, police and other law enforcement people are expected to exercise judgment. That's part of their job description and responsibility. And judging from the number of complaints, lawsuits and backpedaling and restatement that's been going on recently, I'd say that quite a few people in law enforcement have been either exercising bad judgment, or no judgment at all, which in some ways, is even worse.
If a man is running down the street, is he late for a date or is he fleeing from a crime scene? If a woman drives up in an unmarked rental van to Home Depot and buys 10 large bags of fertilizer, is she getting ready to replant a very big garden, or getting ready to make a bomb? If a man takes a picture of the Statue of Liberty, is he a tourist of a terrorist?
It's an open question, and in all of these instances, a certain degree of judgment is required. But in the vast majority of cases, the innocent explanation is the more plausible and correct one.
You also wrote that we shouldn't "blame" the cops or the busybodies who are only reacting to heightened fears, and that we should "get bent at the terrorists"?
That's more of this "culture of victimhood" that seems to prevail society these days, as though we're all helpless victims of larger forces around us.
Certainly, there are many influences in our lives that we have little or no control over, but each and every person has control over how we as individuals reacts and behaves. Fear is a basic and powerful influence, and it takes a lot of effort and conscious and deliberate action to overcome it, but it's still ultimately within our control.
We can choose to allow these negative influences to curtail and shrink our lives, or we can choose to not let them. It's as simple as that.
As for having seen photographic evidence of terrorist surveillance, if they showed you photographs of terrorists renting U-Hauls, should we stop and question every person renting a U-Haul? If they showed you pictures of terrorists getting on commercial airplanes, should we start questioning and taking down the names of every single person who flies on an airplane (in addition to the already over-zealous faux security procedures that occur now)? If they showed you pictures of terrorists buying toothpaste in Wal-Mart, should they start questioning every person who shops at Wal-Mart? See where this sort of logic leads you?
Again, i'm not advocating automatic belligerance and non-compliance with the police. If they had stopped me, asked me some questions, and let me go on my way, I would have no problem with that. But when they start taking names, for no reason other than "walking while carrying a camera", then it starts to get very quickly into Gestapo-land, as far as I'm concerned.
This is what we're trying to avoid and combat. We don't want to become Iran, or North Korea or China, where you're monitored, detained, harassed or worse, for doing nothing worse than evoking whatever paranoid fears exist in the minds of the random "law enforcement" officials that they encounter. Otherwise, we begin to drift into the land of the "unreasonable", as in "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.", as stated in the Fourth Amendment.
Posted 36 months ago.
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I could not have put it any better myself...
It's kept low key intentionaly, firstly to keep people feeling safe Except we're not feeling safe, are we? We're feeling nervous, jittery, paranoid. Which is how governments like us. Governments need bogeymen. A frightened populace is a pliant populace, more likely to do as it is told and keep their 'protectors' in power, lest the bogeyman prevail. And now that the nasty commies are no longer a threat (or until they become a threat again) the brown guys with the beards are our new enemy du jour.
The irony is - our governments are doing their work for them. One guy's failed attempt to get a shoe-bomb on a plane now means that every single air passenger now has to hop through security in their socks. Not to mention the zillions being spent on CCTV, x-ray machines, surveillence networks, etc etc. How Al Quaida must laugh.
I'm not so much getting bent at the cop on the ground, but at the current climate in which common sense has taken a back seat to automaton like paranoia, where it is now apparently a treasonous act to say to an over-zealous officer "Hang on a minute! This is nonsense! What the hell do you think you're doing?". We must come to our senses soon, or be on the slippery slope to an East German style Stazi, where paranoia rules and everyone fears the knock on the door. All in the name of public security, naturally...
Please read this...
www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/04/terrorism.terro...
Posted 36 months ago.
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@ltrev79:
A serious conscern even if you don't believe it is.
Cameras are not flammable - they cannot damage an oil storage facility in any way.
More over in my profession, I have the "pleasure" of listening to quite a few 911 calls both from a caller perspective and a policemans radio perspective. I can tell you this much if someone's walking accross the bridge with a camera in their hand or near the local BP gas station some whacked out person on the street thinks it's Bin Ladden's messanger gathering information for the next attack and frantically calls it in, which the local police car must check out.
And what if the call was about a guy wearing a green shirt - another perfectly LEGAL accessory? The caller should be told that photography is legal - period!
Also, OFTEN grafitti artists bring cameras along with them hen they go to do graffitti and take pics of their work, or come back a few days latter with the camera to do it.
And PHOTOGRAPHERS take pictures of graffiti they find to be artistic.
Apparently the NYPD is continuing to engage in a war against photographers in spite of a recent operations order that told them to back off and MOFTB regulations that specifically ALLOW handheld photography from ANY PUBLIC location in the city.
The City of NY is currently being sued for $2 MILLION by a photographer who was arrested for taking pictures on the subway (charges were dropped because subway photography is LEGAL). Photographers who have been detained have received settlements ranging from $8,000 to $31,000. The $31,000 was awarded to a photographer who was detained for 20 minutes while taking pictures on the subway.
Both the City of New York and the NYPD have repeatedly promised to stop harassing photographers. When do they intend to keep this promise?
The only solution is that photographers who are harassed should not just "move on" - they should drown the city in lawsuits till the harassment stops!
Originally posted 35 months ago.
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Jim Poulos edited this topic 35 months ago.
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A couple of updates.
1. I got a response email from someone at NYCLU. I have to give him a call back.
2. I decided to go take pictures of the fireworks on the Fourth so I headed out in the early afternoon on Saturday to scout possible locations.
From previous experience, I wanted to avoid being right on top of where they would be going off for a variety of reasons. First, the crowds would be horrible. Second, since this was an odd year with the barges being on the Hudson, instead of their usual positions, I had absolutely no idea where they were going to be viewable, so I wanted to give myself a little flexibility, if at the expense of some dramatic effect.
So I walked downtown from around the Intrepid to past 34th Street. Because of all of the activity at the Intrepid, that area looked to be one to avoid. The pier a couple of blocks south looked like it would be a zoo, so I ruled that out as well.
I finally settled on a stretch of 11th Avenue, just south of Javits. This spans the railyards and with no tall buildings covering a 4-block stretch, it was the biggest swath of clear viewing east of the water, so that was my target. I checked with the cop stationed on the corner of 33rd to make sure that the area was going to be open to the public and he told me that as far as he knew, it would be.
I went home and got my equipment, then headed over to the spot around 6:30. I arrived just after 7, and the area, which had already been barricaded off into the first lane of traffic on the east side, was still completely empty, with most of the people still streaming by, heading west, to try and find a spot along the water.
Again, I confirmed with several cops who were standing at the corner that it would be OK for me to set up along the stretch between 30th and 33rd Streets, and they all nodded in agreement.
So I walked down to the very middle of this deserted stretch, with nobody but cops for company, set up my tripod, set up a folding chair, and sat down to wait for darkness.
Since it was sundown, the sun was directly in my face, so instead of facing west, I turned my chair around so that I wouldn't be staring directly into the sun. After about 20 minutes, a few people started taking up positions along the sidewalk, starting from the 33rd Street end, but I was still completely isolated at the middle of the "block", rather conspicuously.
I started taking a few random shots of the barracades, and the skyline that was visible in the setting sunlight. Can anyone guess what happened next? ;)
So one of the cops who had been standing on the corner of 11th and 33rd starts walking down in my direction. Now, there are cops everywhere, and a few had walked by and hadn't batted an eye or even given a look in my direction, including a couple of supervisory officers, but you could tell that this guy was walking towards me. Whether he was taking his initiative, or if he'd been prompted by a superior, I have no idea, but as he pulls up even with me, he starts chit chatting, asking about what I'm taking pictures of, why I'm on 11th instead of down by the water, and why I was sitting facing away from where the fireworks were going to be. I answer all of his questions politely, and I guess I allayed any suspicions he may have had, but as he began to walk away, his parting comment was, "Well, if you keep taking pictures in the wrong direction, don't be surprised if someone else comes by to ask you for your ID."
Nice.
I'm sure that he meant it as a "friendly" heads up, but really, it's nothing more than a gently veiled threat: take pictures of anything that we don't understand, and we're going to harass you.
Posted 35 months ago.
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Apparently the recent operations order telling cops that photography is legal isn't worth the paper it is printed on.
Posted 35 months ago.
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I am not a lawyer, but I did some research on the law after I was stopped by the police after taking pictures in a subway station.
Here's where I laid out my research, but the upshot is:
--New York state DOES have a stop-and-identify law, forcing you to provide ID;
--However, the stop-and-identify law, which can compel you to show ID (rather than just asking you for it), is only triggered when the police are "detaining you", as in a Terry stop. This requires that the police can articulate "reasonable suspicion" that you are engaging in criminal activity...and the state Office of the Attorney General has held that "the refusal to identify oneself will not alone give rise to 'reasonable suspicion.'"
--A case called People v. De Bour lays out a four-part test for differing levels of police intrusion in New York State. It's actually more restrictive than federal law. At the first tier, "an officer may request information from a civilian about his or her identity, reason for being at a particular location, or travel plans, where the request is 'supported by an objective, credible reason, not necessarily indicative of criminality.'" The second tier, called the "common-law right of inquiry", allows an officer to more closely question a civilian in search of more explanatory information, but the civilian is always free to leave. (This level requires a "founded suspicion" that criminal activity is afoot, but the questionee doesn't have to be the suspect.) The third level requires "reasonable suspicion", is equivalent to a Terry stop, and the officer can detain the civilian and compel them to identify themselves. The fourth tier requires "probable cause", and is an arrest.
--As the appellate court wrote in De Bour, "innocuous behavior alone will not generate a founded or reasonable suspicion that a crime is at hand."
Again, I'm not a lawyer, but thought this information might be useful.
Posted 35 months ago.
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Thanks for researching this, Vidot. However, even if I am allowed to do it, if I am stopped, I will avoid innocuous behavior.
Posted 35 months ago.
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New York, New York /
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I think in NY that you would be hard put to be taking a photograph anywhere at all, that couldn't be interpreted by a zealous officer (or a random busybody) as a potential 'terrorist target'. 
I could not have put it any better myself...
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