Brits: rally to save your right to photograph the police, Feb 16 at Scotland Yard
Britons are planning on rallying at Scotland Yard on Feb 16 to protest the new law that lets the cops throw you in jail for ten years for photographing them in action, if your photo is "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism."
The National Union of Journalists, in association with British Journal of Photography, has called for photographers to make their voices heard at a rally on 16 February as a new law is introduced that allows for the arrest - and potential imprisonment - of anyone who takes pictures of police officers 'likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism'...Section 76 ignites new debate (Thanks, Simon!)The NUJ has teamed up with Mark Thomas, a writer, broadcaster, comic and political activisit, along with Chris Atkins, who is behind the documentary Taking Liberties, and BJP for a 'photo opportunity' outside New Scotland Yard on Monday 16 February. 'The plan is simple, turn up with your camera and exercise your democratic right to take a photograph in a public place,' says Marc Vallee, an NUJ member who will be there on the day, and who himself clashed with police over the right to photograph public events
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Can't make it to London but I'll take my camera to work with me and use my lunch hour to photograph every cop I see near my office. Anyone else in Edinburgh up for it?
This law and its makers are contemptuous. Good on you for covering the story.
Not so much a rally to save our right to photograph the police as a rally to lament a right we are about to lose (and because its inside the zone it can't even be a rally, but an 'individual decision to take a photo').
I wish I could be there. Aus. is a bit far to travel.
I'll be out all day with my camera though, and every policeman will be recorded for posterity.
if your photo is "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism."
Well, it seems like an easy affirmative defense based on the fact that they have no freaking idea what is "likely to be useful" to a terrorist. Shoes! Shampoo! Children!
Or maybe it's just a shortcut around anti-authoritarianism, which might have something to do with terrorism. Beatings will continue, etc.
US can help protest by camping out at any neighborhood donut shops and snap away.
Given the number of times innocent civilians have been saved from being falsely convicted as cop hating felons primarily based on evidence from third party photos of cops at work, I can't imagine how any honest person, police officer or otherwise, could support such a 'law'. While a lot of us can't get to the UK for this rally, we can still boycott the UK if they institute such an anti-human rights ban. Plenty of us have been boycotting Boston for lesser crimes.
They wouldn't need this law if these policemen didn't have something to hide.
If the law is to apply equally to everyone, this is ample grounds for an investigation.
How exactly do you boycott the UK anyway? We hardly manufacture anything, and what we do still make isn't on most people's shopping lists (weapons, machinery, trains, ships, planes and chemicals).
Even though a ten-year sentence is very unlikely, this would be in practical terms just as bad if the maximum penalty was a £50 fine. Because it would still give cause for arresting someone who was photographing a cop, and that is not of itself in any way a criminal or suspicious act.
I don't dislike police officers. They for the most part do an essential and often unpleasant job very well. But if you tell PC Plod that the law is now such that anyone photographing him might be committing an offence then he's going to be suspicious any time a camera is waved in his general direction. This is bad for the owner of the camera. It's also bad for everyone else and indeed bad for PC Plod, because if he's wasting his time being suspicious about harmless things then he's not devoting his time to proper police work.
This is another downside of New Labour's drive to legislate against anything that doesn't conform with their neofabian vision. The more offences you create, the less likely the police are to have time to deal with the ones that have always mattered.
Anyway, I'll be there on Monday. At the very least I ought to get some interesting photos.
I'll be looking to get there.
The irony of course, being that the polis will be taking pictures of all the protesters...
"The Home Office argues that the Terrorism Act 2000 already makes it an offence to 'collect or make a record of information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism' and that the new law will not change anything."
WTF? So why do they want to have this legislation if it will not change anything? 1984 really HAS become a government manual - talk about double-think.
Who decided to hold it on a working day? *sigh*
#9 - yeah - that too. It's ok for BJP and NUJ people to go do this on a Monday - they can call it work. Maybe they don't want Joe amateur photographer's support - seriously - is this INTENDED to be a professionals' protest?
I'm going to this. I myself am not a massive photographer, nor do I wish to photograph police to be honest. But many of my friends are photographers and the such like, and I'm fed up with watching our freedom being removed one piece at a time. I also know this sounds really lame, but is there a FB group or anything for this so I can send info about it to more people?
@#11 scratch that, FB page here http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=47417324089
Spread the word!
9, 10 - the rally is on Monday because that's the day the new law comes into effect.
You did actually read the linked article before commenting, didn't you?
#13 Yes, most people here are literate to some degree.
And no laws will be coming into effect the day before. That fact doesn't preclude any kind of protest against any laws that might be coming in the week ahead.
What DOES prevent someone joining such a protest is having a job, and the requirement of taking a day off work to trek halfway across the country at this short notice.
Of course, if I'd been actively interested, rather than passively interested, perhaps I'd have known about this for weeks.