Appears a female cop in plain clothes was an agent provocateur.

Thank you and that’s an excellent point. Police departments are still largely male and white, but they do look much different than they did twenty to thirty years ago. To expand on your point, this increased diversity has generally not made P.D.’s more respectful of civil liberties or less likely to engage in egregious abuses and/or corrupt activities.

C. Van Carter is apparently a racist, but he doesn’t seem to mind when minorities don the uniform and fuck shit up in the hood. And I’m sure he also tolerates people of color when they entertain him or cook for him. Hell, I’m sure he has “black friends” too.

Or perhaps Van Carter is just doing his late, angry white man period Murray Rothbard impression. Never forget that mister “Enemy of the State” himself decided that “the cops must be unleashed” to deal with those darn unruly minorities. I believe that was his reaction to the LA riots of ’92 (Read Brian Doherty’s “Radicals for Capitalism” for more on that). So it seems that some “libertarians” are not so libertarian when certain classes of people (minorities, workers, leftists, etc) get agitated and decide they are sick of living on their knees. Maybe the pro-liberty mask falls off of folks like Rothbard because many who use the term “libertarian” are not CONSISTENTLY libertarians, as they do not challenge ALL forms of domination. They are, in reality just conservatives or liberals of some strain.

It would be nice if we could instantly say that folks like C. Van Carter are just ignorant racists from some fringe group. But sometimes things are more complicated than that.

They wrote their blood types on their arms because it seemed certain that many people were going to get shot or injured regardless of how much they complied.

Okay, it’s only Wkipedia but:

“The massacre resulted in the violent deaths of between 19 and 25 people; sources vary but all sources include two women and eleven children, asphyxiated and burned to death under a single tent.”

I wasn’t there; all I have to go on is the video. Same as you, probably. Calling it a “protest” is a way to justify the violence. Whether it was an actual protest is questionable. Looked to me as if it were people upset with an earlier event, not any kind of organized protest.

The organized bastards were the cops. They KNEW there were children (the stroller surely tipped them off) and they still fired. They still sent the dog in.

I’m willing to accept the advice you’re offering in the same context I would accept, say, advice ot just pay the bribe and not make trouble when confronted with a Mexican speeding ticket, or to stay away from political demonstrations in Egypt. But it’s not consistent with a democratic society to say “well, if you dare petition the authorities for redress of greivances, it’s reasonable to expect that your head may get busted or someone may turn his vicious dog on your kids.”

This sort of thing will stop when the mayor and police chief and ranking policeman in charge of policing a protest of this kind understand, all the way down in their bones, that a brutal response to a protest will end their careers, and when the individual officers involved know the same thing. When the cop who pepper sprays a bunch of peaceful protesters is widely known to have ended up working on a loading dock at Wal-Mart, because absolutely no law enforcement or private security company would have him anymore, then taking your kids to a protest march will be much safer. When the mayor who sends goons to break up the annoying protests in the city park finds that he has zero chance of being re-elected and nobody will return his phone calls, when the police chief is invited by the city council to take early retirement after ordering a head-busting breakup of a protest march, then this stuff will get better.

I’m not saying the cops are right; in fact, I am perfectly willing to believe that the cops are absolutely wrong. But when there’s an impromptu demonstration and I hear that (Oh, my goodness!) “women and children” were attacked, I’m going to confess that I’m not very sympathetic. Leave the kids home. Do you not have a babysitter or relative that can watch the kids? Sorry, but you’re going to have to leave the protesting to someone else then, no matter your outrage.

To spell it out in a bit more:

When the police tell you to hand the phone over, it may be a request or it may be an order. The police don’t know if it is a request or an order (they will decide later depending on how it goes down). You also don’t know if it is a request or an order.

By stating that you do not consent to hand the phone over, you make it clear that you are interpreting the instruction as a request rather than an order. However, the policeman will probably decide that he intended the request to be an order. He may do this with a verbal order, or he may do this by attempting to grab the phone.

Once the police clarifies, by word or deed, that he is ordering you to give the phone, the only safe strategy, legally, is to give up the phone with great alacrity and meek compliance.

Not complying with the order leads to two legal risks, which will now be briefly identified. One risk is that a judge will decide that police had a lawful right to seize the phone based on exigent circumstances. If the judge decides that there were exigent circumstances (wrong decision imo fwiw), then you disobey a lawful order and become guilty of the crime of obstruction. You don’t want that.

To spin it out a different way, even if the judge decides it was an unlawful order, you may be guilty of obstruction anyway. As of right now, many jurisdictions make it a crime to disobey even an unlawful order. That may or may not constitutional for the jurisdiction to do, but, unless and until the constitutional law on this point gets clearer, you shouldn’t run the risk of disobeying even an unlawful order.

To spin it out still a different way, if police get your phone, especially while it is recording, you will have some good legal grounds to press them hard and fast to get the phone back after the incident is over. After the phone comes back, you can maintain the suit for recompense during the seizure period.

Ultimately, poster David correctly suggests that the best long term solution is technological. Steaming is the start. Going beyond that, there can be hidden secondary batteries, continuing GPS monitoring, continuing surreptitious recording (activated by removal of the primary battery, loss of signal or remote command). Recording police at the scene is awesome (especially if it i an Anaheim style beatdown), but recording what they say back at the police station is super duper awesome. Once that happens a couple times, they won’t WANT your phone.

The best place to hide the recording device is inside the battery itself (because it will have a power source “hidden in plain site”). Once the ACLU (or perhaps Stringer Bell) designs this product, things will get interesting in a good way.