Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

June 7, 2011

Why are police are trained to treat camera-wielding citizens as if they were criminals?

On June 2, a uniformed officer for the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority noticed a citizen filming him. The officer waddled over to warn the bystander ? ?speaking not as a police officer, but as a person? ? that if the filming didn?t stop, he would ?[blanking] break his face.? Of course, if the roles were reversed, the citizen would have been arrested for threatening the cop, even if the threat had been directly only at the ?person? and not at the uniform.

After Miami Beach police shot and killed a man on Memorial Day, they confiscated a camera from a witness at gunpoint and tried to destroy the video. To his credit, the witness extracted the memory card and concealed it in his mouth, thereby preserving evidence that the police had sought to destroy. The same police illegally confiscated a camera from a local news crew.

Police often insist that if citizens are doing nothing wrong, we have nothing to fear from them. Why doesn?t that principle apply to the police?

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.