This morning I’ve been following a little trail that actually started from and item on PDNPulse which they had picked up from the Minnesota Indpendent .
The MI story listed 42 members of the news media who were arrested or detained during the policing of the protests outside the Republican National Convention (RNC) there, and two further names had already been added in comments on their story when I visited the site.
It’s hard to know how many of them were photographers (or videographers) because in many cases only the name of the organisation they were working for is given, but certainly more than the 11 listed by PDN are described as such in the MI story – and the two extra names are also photographers. But all 44 were media workers – and most if not all will have had ID to make that clear.
And of course in these days it’s a fair bet that most of them were carrying and using cameras – like Seth Rowe mentioned below – even if they are not called ‘photographers.’
Vlad Teichberg of the NY new media art group ‘Glass Bead Collective‘ and two colleagues were detained by Minneapolis police and searched; police confiscated their cameras, computers and notes for several days (perhaps surprisingly for a new media group they even had a camera with film in it, and apparently the police examined this in daylight but couldn’t see the pictures) but was released without charge.
In a short video clip on MI, Teichberg makes the point that there are just so many cameras around now that we have passed the point where police can actually stop videos of them behaving badly appearing on sites like You-tube, and that their only sensible response now is to keep within the law. It’s a point the police have yet to grasp.
On the Minneapolis Sun, Seth Rowe, community editor of the St. Louis Park Sun-Sailor writes about how he talked to the police chief about the situation and then went there determined to follow police instructions – and found himself arrested for doing just that. He gives a lengthy eye-witness report of his treatment, which suggests that many of the arrests were made simply to boost the pay of the officers concerned.
Another account worth reading comes from AP photographer Matt Rourke and was posted on the MinnPost web site along with the last picture he took before his arrest. Rather curiously the police allowed him to hand his camera over to a colleague when he was arrested.
The story also mentions – though rather unsympathetically – some of the other media workers arrested, with links to a couple of popular videos of their arrests which you may have already seen. If not they are also worth a look.