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WATCH: Florida Deputy Illegally Arrests PINAC Reporter Protesting At High School
Broadcast by honoryouroath + YouTube
Florida Sheriff’s deputies illegally enforced the “school safety zones” trespassing law against PINAC reporter Jeff Gray, outside of a St. Augustine high school earlier today. Gray complied with law enforcement orders, and is currently being held in the northeastern Florida St. Johns County jail, but oddly no charges are listed with his mugshot, unlike all of the other suspects as you can see below.
The St. Johns Sheriff’s Office has wanted to detain Gray for many months now, after the local schools Superintendent declared him persona non grata, even though Gray has a son currently attending St. Augustine High School and two other children in the system.
Jeff Gray was arrested while protesting with a sign in hand, the SLAPP lawsuit filed against him by St. Johns Schools last December. The legal action was filed along with 38 SLAPP letters sent to his home address by certified mail, one of which invoked Florida Statute 810.0975 and its “school safety zones.”
“How are you doing, Mr. Gray?” asked the Florida deputy as he got out of his patrol car, wearing street clothing, to which Jeff responded, “Pretty good. How are you?” “May I ask you why are you here?” asked the St. Johns sheriff’s deputy. “I am peacefully assembling and peacefully protesting,” replied Gray. “Ok. Do you realize [that] this is a violation of your no trespass order that was issued. Correct?” asked the deputy.
“No, it’s not actually. There’s a provision that that says “shall not infringe on the right to peacefully assemble and protest If you look in the statute, it’s right there,” said Gray, whose HonorYourOath YouTube page is famously filled with instances like these where the reporter very carefully expresses to the officers his statutory or constitutional rights, and he re-iterated for emphasis, “In the statute. That’s why I’m here.”
“This is within the 500 foot safety rule, so i’m putting you under arrest for violation of that trespass order,” replied the Florida deputy who seemed to suddenly remember that Gray is a reporter and would in all likelihood be recording the scene, “If you would, put your sign down, turn your phone off, put your hands behind your back, turn around please. Put your hands together like you’re praying, please.”
Gray surrendered to detainment. “If you look at the statute, there’s a provision…” said Gray as the sheriff’s deputy cuffed him. But Jeff Gray is right. The last sentence of the “School Safety Zones” statute reads: “Nothing in this section shall be construed to abridge or infringe upon the right of any person to peaceably assemble and protest.”
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Sunday March 20 2016, @06:04PM
I come at this from a bit of an idiosyncratic angle. I tend to think that in these situations that by the time a police officer comes up to a guy who's taking pictures of a public building, there are already a few people peeking out the blinds of nearby buildings asking "what's up with that guy?"
Police don't actually enforce the law in our system. That's not the policing algorithm. They actually tend to look for behaviors that are outside of some range of expectations and make judgments about whether further actions need to be taken. The law comes into play when there is an action that is backed by the authority of a court. As I noted before, the courts generally extend a broad range of protections to actions under the policing algorithm, although never framed in those terms.
Obviously this is deeply unsatisfying but there's always this gap between the way that people interact and the ways that we write about how they should interact. It's satisfying to say that the laws should clearly delineate what is and isn't allowed and police action should be constrained to a narrow range of allowed enforcement actions, but there's a mismatch between how people act and how people say people ought to act.
There's a difference between what people say is a priority and what they actually treat as a priority. The truth is that people commit to prioritizing more stuff than they can actually handle and if you randomly audit anything that's supposedly important (but hasn't been subject to random audits in the past), you actually find a lot of failures. This doesn't mean that you can fix everything by randomly auditing everything, it just means that if you randomly audit enough stuff you start to see the real problem is that people promise more than they can deliver.
What things really amount to is that, socially, you have to decide what your priorities are and bargain with other people on representation of those priorities. Again, people do this, but they don't write down the things they really mean. And people use the things that are written down as leverage to strengthen the representation of their priorities. SLAPP lawsuits? Leverage. No trespass order? Leverage. Florida sunshine law requests? Leverage. Recording interactions with police where you are carefully sticking to a script of whitelisted actions? Leverage. Anything you do where you are either searching for or attempting to construct another party's non-compliance with rules is trying to gain leverage under those rules.
The real tyranny is being surrounded by people who don't agree with you. The mechanism by which that tyranny exerts itself on you is not as important as the tyranny itself. Pressing your leverage doesn't change that tyranny. People moderating their priorities is what changes the tyranny.