Assaulted by penny-ante Miami rentacops. Fortunately, this photographer had the good sense to have OTHER photographers on site.
We walked through the parking lot of the Douglas Road Metrorail Station and purchased tickets. Dobbs and I then walked inside through the turnstile with me holding up my Canon TX1. The rest of the news crew remained outside.
Within seconds, I was accosted by the female security guard as well as the male security guard wearing a black beret and a single latex glove who knocked the camera from my hand.
I demanded my camera but he refused to give it back.
Then I remembered I had my iPhone, so I started shooting video with that, which prompted the female security to get in my face.
She even lifted her fist up a couple of times as if she was going to strike me.
The male guard then came after me and I also tried walking away from him while videotaping.
But when he struck me, I struck back instinctively.
He then pulled out a metal baton and came after me with it.
I stepped outside the station and he sat down to tend to his lip.
Miami-Dade detectives who arrived on the scene were considering charging me with battery until they saw the footage shot by the news crew.
After two hours of talking to cops, my camera was returned to me, minus a battery that somehow got lost.
If you wear a badge of any kind and abuse your authority, real or imaginary (as is the case with these doofuses), some criminal multiplier must apply.
The way that relatively normal people get suddenly crazed and irate when they see somebody shooting pictures or video continues to be a minor pain in my ass. I regularly go out to potential job sites and take pictures that I intend to use for scaling and design.
I can’t tell you how many times I have been challenged by security guards and/or ordinary employees for my (apparently) assaultive picture taking, and when I explain who I am, what I am doing, and why, they cannot or will not listen- instead they remain locked in their freakout emotional state. The moment they see the camera come out, all bets are off. You might as well have pulled out a gun. I deal with it as diplomatically as possible, after all, I’m trying to make my living.
The psychological underpinnings of the behavior are more interesting to me than the legal aspect. You’ve really got to push the issue very, very hard (and relentlessly) to get yourself whacked over the head. This clown deliberately sought out and provoked a confrontation, and he got it. My sympathy level here is measured at absolute zero.
No, photography is not a crime, but being a chronic and deliberate pain in the ass ought to be. One gets the pathetic sense that our bloodied victim of horrific police violence in this instance harbors a wildly inappropriate delusion that he shares spiritual ground with those who participated in the Selma to Montgomery marches. Needling inept and poorly trained Metrorail cops doesn’t count for much of anything in my book other than grounds for being aggressively ignored.