Law makes an Ass of itself?

Robert Kabakoff is an actor who has appeared in a couple of films, but now is more famous as a photographer. Cycling through Central Park in New York last April he saw a woman getting a bit of sun on her nether regions, “laying on her stomach with her skirt pulled up over her butt” and felt this would make an amusing picture.

So he jumped off his bike and took a snap with his phone from around 15 feet. One of the woman’s friends noticed him and the woman complained to a cop. Kabakoff was handcuffed and taken in a police car to the station, where he was charged with “unlawful surveillance” and spent the night in jail – it was 18 hours before he was released.

Perhaps because Kabakoff is a graduate of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice he had the sense to sue the City, and he settled out of court for $8,000 which paid for him to have a month in Paris.

Most of the details above come from a report on the NY Daily News web site, but rather more interesting to us is the commentary by Carolyn E Wright on her Photo Attorney blog, where she makes clear exactly what that offence means.   It does outlaw surreptitious photography of people “dressing or undressing or the sexual or other intimate parts of such person” but only when that person has a reasonable expectation of privacy. Clearly this cannot apply in a public open space such as Central Park.

But I wouldn’t want to encourage people to follow Kabakoff’s example. It may be legal (at least in the UK), but I think it is also rather likely to cause offence – as it did. Of course there are times when there is a real public interest in taking pictures that cause offence, but this clearly doesn’t seem to me to be one of them.

I also found the story mentioned on the War On Photography site, which has previously awarded the New York City Police Department one of its
Honorary Order of Lenin Awards.
This site is also the first place I’ve found with a link which works in the UK to the Colbert Report programme on the ‘Amtrak Photo Incident.’  It’s a rather heavy-handed American comedy report on an incident in which a member of the NPPA found himself arrested for taking pictures on a railway station – and what was he doing? Taking pictures to enter in the photo competition run by the railway company, Amtrak. He still intends to enter the competition.

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