Another Brick In The Wall

Another Brick In The Wall

"Suspicion is a global variable. Once triggered it bubbles upward through the entire system. Walking down Park Lane, I was accosted by a man in a suit who demanded to know what I was doing. He took out his mobile phone, pointed it at my face, told me he was going to “circulate my description”.

"Shortly afterwards, a colleague of his physically restrained me and called the police. Both men worked at the Grosvenor House Hotel, whose cameras were among those which had been trained on me as I walked, and so are included in my documentation."

"When they arrived, the police officers explained that carrying a camera in the vicinity of Central London was grounds for suspicion. I might be a terrorist who posed a threat to the good citizens of London – my own city. Equally I might be casing the joint for some future crime, studying its defences in order to circumvent them."

"Carrying a camera thus justified the suspicion of the security guards who stopped me and performed a citizen’s arrest, detaining me until the arrival of the police. This suspicion in turn justified the actions of the police, who threatened me with arrest if I did not identify myself and explain my actions. For carrying a camera, I was told, I could be taken to the station and charged with “Going Equipped”, a provision of the 1968 Theft Act which determines the imprisonment for up to three years of anyone carrying equipment which may be used to commit a burglary."

"Of course, the threats of the policemen were utterly baseless. Of course the use of cameras in public, as dictated in numerous statements by the Metropolitan Police themselves, is not, and should not be construed as, a crime. But, as anyone who has ever encountered the police in an analogous situation knows, the law comes a distant second to the exercise of power itself."

via George Station
http://shorttermmemoryloss.com/nor/2014/11/07/all-cameras-are-police-cameras/

Comments

  1. Drew McCarthyJune 9, 2018 at 8:22 AM

    And from the comments: ”The poor are collectively unseizable. They are not only the majority on the planet, they are everywhere and the smallest event speaks of them. This is why the essential activity of the rich today is the building of walls — walls of concrete, of electronic surveillance, of missile barrages, minefields, frontier controls, and opaque media screens.“

    — John Berger “Ten Dispatches About Endurance in the Face of Walls” (October 2004)

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