Orwell’s World: Reporters Arrested by Police for Recording DC Taxicab Commission Public Meeting (video)
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on June 25, 2011
“Sir, this is a public meeting! I’m a reporter!”
The government has video and still cameras positioned in every major city in the nation, in buildings, on street corners, in public schools… but can reporters be arrested in Washington, DC for using a cell camera for recording while reporting on a public meeting?
Freedom of speech has been turned upside-down.
Welcome to George Orwell’s “1984″ world…
Jim Epstein Discusses His Arrest at the DC Taxicab Commission Meeting with Judge Andrew Napolitano | June 23, 2011
Here’s Epstein’s Reason.TV video of what happened at the meeting:
From Business Insider, D.C. Reporter Gets Arrested For Recording At A Public Meeting:
Reason.tv producer Jim Epstein was arrested for filming a fellow journalist’s arrest at a Washington, D.C. Taxi Commission meeting Wednesday.
According to Epstein’s account, he witnessed journalist Pete Tucker take a still photo of the proceedings with his camera phone. When Tucker was placed under arrest for taking the picture, the crowd reacted, Epstein broke out his iPhone and recorded Tucker getting hand-cuffed.
Epstein details what happened next:
A few minutes later, as I was attempting to leave the building, I overheard the female officer who had arrested Tucker promise a woman, who I presumed to be an employee of the Taxi Commission, that she would confiscate my phone. Reason intern Kyle Blaine, overheard her say, “Do you want his phone? I can get his phone.”
(The woman who was given assurances by the officer that she could have my phone can be seen at the end of the video telling me, “You do not have permission to record this!”)
Heading out the door Epstein ignored warnings to stop and “stay put” and was surrounded by officers. When he tried to get the attention of a group of nearby cab drivers, Epstein was arrested.
From Washington City Paper, “Sheer Insanity” as Reporters Arrested at Taxicab Commission Hearing:
The folks at the D.C. Taxicab Commission and the U.S. Park Police have got some splainin’ to do, as two reporters were arrested today during a DCTC meeting for, you know, reporting.
Pete Tucker, a journalist at TheFightBack.org and a frequent advocate for independent taxi drivers, and Jim Epstein, a producer and journalist for Reason.tv, were arrested by the Park Police, apparently at the behest of members of the DCTC. Tucker and Epstein were at a DCTC public hearing that was for some reason not at its usual location but at the Park Police station at 1901 Anacostia Dr. SE.
Here’s Tucker’s version of events: He says he was taking pictures of commission members sitting at a dais when a hack inspector (or taxi inspector, if you don’t know what hack inspector means) told Tucker he couldn’t take pictures at the meeting. Tucker says he tried to continue to take pictures when the hack inspector stood in front of him, blocking his view. So Tucker says he took a picture of the hack inspector.
A bit later, says Tucker, two Park Police officers came in and told Tucker, who was sitting in the front row, that he had to leave with them. Tucker declined, saying he was a journalist at a public meeting and wasn’t going to leave. After a back-and-forth with the officers, Tucker says he was handcuffed and taken out of the meeting and to a downstairs holding cell.
His arrest, as you can see from the video above, did not sit well with the cabbies in attendance. “It was sheer insanity,” says cabbie Larry Frankel, who is also an prominent cab organizer.
From Washington Post, D.C. Taxicab Commission says it banned ‘disruptive’ videotaping:
In case you missed it: The D.C. Taxicab Commission has come under quite a bit of scrutiny in the past 24 hours or so after two reporters — Pete Tucker of thefightback.org and Jim Epstein of Reason TV — were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and illegal “remaining” while attending a commission hearing Wednesday.
Last night, Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s office issued a statement from the commission’s interim chairwoman, Dena C. Reed, saying that she did not order their arrests. But the decision of U.S. Park Police to detain the reporters followed a dispute with Reed and commission staff over whether they were allowed to photograph or otherwise record the proceedings. I asked for the commission’s policy on those matters.
In another statement today, Reed said that the commission has indeed banned videotaping of its proceedings, explaining that the commission has ”found television cameras to be disruptive to meetings” due to factors including “the size of the Commission hearing room, the fact that cameramen must move around and place cameras in the faces of Commissioners and guests and that some attendees have demonstrated a tendency to act in a more disruptive manner when cameras are present.”
The statement also said that Tucker was “defiant and disrespectful of [Reed’s] request and suggestions” to place his microphone somewhere other than in front of her and later “caused some distraction” by moving his microphone between witnesses and commission members.
“In order to get usable audio, you need to be close to the speaker,” Tucker explained today. “The table that she offered was five or 10 yards off to the right. I could put it there, but I don’t think the audio would be worth listening to.”
The statement does not address the immediate cause of his arrest, which Tucker said was his taking a still photograph on his cell phone.
[...]
District law is silent on whether or not photography or recordings are permitted during public proceedings. The current open meetings law has been in effect for less than a year, and there has yet to be any litigation on this particular issue. But restrictions on recording meetings of deliberative bodies are, generally speaking, unusual. D.C. Council, for instance, does not restrict audio or videotaping. However, it’s not unheard of for a government body to have such restrictions. Federal courts and many state courts ban photography and recordings of what are otherwise open proceedings.
From E.D. Kain, Forbes, Why Are D.C. Police Arresting Journalists at a Public Meeting?:
Are journalists no longer allowed to take pictures or videos at public meetings? What exactly is the D.C. Taxi Commission attempting to keep under wraps at this public meeting?
For the life of me, I can’t understand how this is either legal or – in any sense of the word – a smart thing to do. At least not in the age of camera phones that can upload videos to the internet.
More reporting from the Daily Caller. Local news station WTOP has discovered that the incident hasn’t exactly led to a new spirit of openness:
In an effort to get an explanation about the incident, WTOP’s Mark Segraves went to the commission office Friday and was thrown out by security. The door to the office was subsequently locked, and the lights turned off — leaving the entire cab commission office in the dark.
Video encore… I previously embedded this video in a post a few weeks ago — the video accompanied a story about Maryland transit officers detaining a man who was photographing light rail trains.
The Government’s War on Cameras!
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