Police threaten to seize my camera for crime of public photography

By David McElroy · May 9, 2015

It’s one thing to read articles over and over about police harassing innocent people for taking photos in public. It’s quite another to experience it yourself and have an angry cop threaten to seize my camera, but that happened to me Saturday.

It’s all for the children, you know.

I was at the Buck Creek Festival in Helena, Ala., taking photos on a freelance assignment from a newspaper. The managing editor of the paper had asked me to get “candid shots, photos of kids enjoying the event’s attractions, etc.” In other words, it was very typical photography for a public event. It wasn’t a big deal.

After I’d been shooting a little more than an hour, a police lieutenant from the Helena Police Department approached me. He said that he had received reports that I was taking pictures, including pictures of children. Considering the fact that I’d been walking around with my Canon T3i for the past hour — openly taking pictures and talking to random people — it’s clear that this wasn’t exactly something I was trying to hide.

I acknowledged it and asked what the problem was.

(In recounting the narrative from here, I am reconstructing it to the best of my memory’s ability, but since I didn’t take notes or record it, the details might be jumbled or out of order, mostly because I was rattled by the incident. The essence of the narrative is correct, though.)

The cop said he had gotten four reports that I had been taking pictures — including pictures of kids. He said he hadn’t done anything about it the first three times it was reported, but he had a duty now to find out what I was doing and “send you on your way.”

I asked why that was and what law I was supposed to have broken. He couldn’t answer that, but he didn’t like me asking. I told him that I was shooting pictures for a newspaper and I told him which one. That shouldn’t have mattered, because public photography is perfectly legal whether you’re a newspaper employee or just shooting pictures for yourself.

It was about this point that he threatened to seize my camera.

I told him that seizing my camera would be illegal, because I had done nothing wrong and there wasn’t even a reasonable suspicion that any crime had been committed. This made him angrier. He said he had probable cause to seize the camera, so I asked him again what crime he had reason to believe I had broken.

Do you know what someone looks like when he’s angry but he’s trying to control it — and the muscles around the lips tighten and the lips lose their color? That’s the way he looked at this point. He seemed furious that I dared to ask him what he thought I was doing wrong.

He told me that I was “coping an attitude” and trying to be a “roadside lawyer.” I told him I’m not a lawyer and neither is he, but I do know what my rights are. Public photography isn’t a crime and he had absolutely no reason to think I had committed a crime.

The lieutenant demanded to see my identification and he called my driver’s license in on police radio to have it checked. So even though I had done nothing wrong and he couldn’t tell me any reason that he might believe otherwise, he ran my license through some database. Maybe I’m now marked as a troublemaker. Who knows?

He told me that if I were going to take pictures at something like this, I had to have a press ID, but if I come to someplace like this dressed in all black — I was wearing a black t-shirt and black sweats, which must be terrifying in his world — without a press ID, I was subject to having my camera seized.

I reminded him again that public photography isn’t a crime and that I would have been just as free to take these pictures if I were taking them for myself instead of for a newspaper. He wasn’t listening. He was threatening and telling me that he had a “duty” to check me out and “send you on your way.”

At that point, I realized that there was nothing to be gained from continuing the conversation. I simply asked, “Am I free to go?”

He looked annoyed, but said I was free to leave. I left before he got angry enough to trump up a charge and arrest me.

I left, but I was both angry and shaken up by the incident. I didn’t think to get the guy’s name, simply because I had been rattled. It’s not every day that I have a confrontation with an angry man who has a gun and a badge and a bad attitude. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have started recording audio or video of the incident on my iPhone as soon as it happened, but that didn’t occur to me until afterward.

What am I going to go about it?

I don’t know, but probably nothing. His police superiors and political superiors would back him up. They would invoke children and their duty to protect kids, even though they wouldn’t be able to say what law I had broken or what law they suspected I had broken.

I’m left concerned that it might affect my relationship with a newspaper client. The newspaper obviously doesn’t want problems with local police departments, so I have no idea how its management might react to this. I reported the basics of the confrontation to the paper’s managing editor by email as soon as I got back to my car, but I haven’t heard from him (and have no idea whether he will comment on it).

So not only did this arrogant cop upset my afternoon, but I’m left wondering whether it will cost me money. This was my first freelance photography assignment for this particular newspaper. If I never get another assignment, I will always wonder whether this lieutenant cost me money.

We live in a paranoid society. The public is paranoid and police are doubly paranoid. But that doesn’t change what the law allows. I have the right to take pictures in public without fear of someone with a gun and a badge threatening to seize my camera. I sympathize with police who get complaints from paranoid people — if he really did get the complaints he claims — and he has every right to ask someone like me a question if he wants.

But if he has no reason to believe that a crime has been committed — and he obviously didn’t — the correct response to those people is, “Well, sir, I’ll ask the guy why he’s taking pictures, I guess, but since there’s no law against what he’s doing, I can’t stop him. We have no reason to think he’s doing anything wrong.”

People like to talk about supporting freedom, but when push comes to shove, a lot of them don’t want to allow other people freedom. They want a police state that panders to their paranoia. That’s what this confrontation was about.

In a very real way, this confrontation has had a chilling effect on my freedom. As it turned out, I wasn’t arrested and he didn’t carry out his threat to seize my camera. But the next time I think about taking pictures in public, I might simply leave the camera hidden instead of risk running into somebody who doesn’t understand the law and his proper authority.

Unless I do something wrong, I simply want to be left alone.

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Spring always reminds me how glorious blue skies and green leaves can be. When I was in the second grade, Mrs. Arnold chastised me for using those colors together. She said they didn’t match. Mrs. Arnold had very specific rules about which colors could be used together. We couldn’t deviate from her rules. When I used green and blue together in one of my class drawings, she forced me to do it over, since she said those colors shouldn’t be used together. I was a polite and obedient child, but I asked her why they didn’t match — since God used them together in nature. She was exasperated and told me to follow her rules. So when I see glorious beauty which mixes green and blue — such as this photo I took just outside my office Friday afternoon — it always reminds me of Mrs. Arnold. It reminds me that she was wrong. And it’s a good reminder for us all. There are established rules about a lot of things. Many of those are good rules. But if an expert tells you something and you know he’s wrong, you might need to take a chance. He might be just as mistaken as Mrs. Arnold was.

In the coming months and years, we’re going to need inventive and productive people pursuing things that matter. We’re going to need smart and self-directed men and women who will find ideas and create enterprises that will help bypass the political class and build a new and better society. But everything I see in media right now seems geared toward telling people how to entertain and amuse themselves. The stories are full of advice about what to binge on Netflix and what games you should be playing while you’re stuck at home. We desperately need to ignore this advice and be looking toward building new futures instead. Being passive consumers got us where we are today. It’s time that we reclaim our former role — the one that made this country wealthy — as productive and free people who build far more than we consume. This could be a great opportunity for those who will take it. Turn off Netflix. Put down the video game controller. We need new ideas, new achievements, new goals — not more coach potatoes. This is the time to be thinking and creating and planning for the future that you and I both want.

The better I know myself, the more I realize that my core fault — and the source of many other failings in me — is that of believing on a deep level that everyone and everything in my world must be perfect, especially me. If I had seen any of this in myself as recently as 10 years ago, I would have dismissed it as a small failing that showed up only every now and then, but I now see it as the wellspring from which my other sins are born. It’s such an insidious belief — and one that can look on the surface like a reasonable desire to be good and right — that it’s hard to acknowledge it as the inner cancer it is. But until I understood this, it was always going to be impossible for me to get over my deep shame about my imperfection or to accept the love of another person, because she is bound to be flawed, too.

If it’s not yet spring where you are, you can at least enjoy 60 seconds of spring in the South with me. This was just outside my office late Thursday afternoon. Don’t you need a relaxing break today? See it on YouTube by clicking here.

It pays to be nice to the employees at Walmart — and everywhere else, for that matter. I was just in Walmart to buy some kitty litter when one of the employees called me over with a conspiratorial tone: “Hey, David, do you need some toilet paper?” she almost whispered. She had found a giant package hidden somewhere and she said she had been saving it for someone she really liked. So I’m the proud new owner of 24 additional mega rolls of toilet paper, which are worth something like $748 on the black market. On a more serious note, be good to people when you have a chance, as this employee was for me. And remember that people remember the way you treat them. I wouldn’t have treated this woman and her co-workers a bit differently in the past if I’d known she would someday do me this small favor, but there are benefits to treating people well, even if that’s not your purpose. Be good to each other.

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