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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 Tuesday March 15 2016, @04:09AM
I am in favor of improving police accountability and making de-escalation the first tool that they reach for. I'm not sure that I buy into the idea that he's making progress in that direction by conspicuously loitering outside of public buildings to film interactions with police officers and then protesting the results of said pattern of behavior.
Now, one legitimate problem is that the police have historically enjoyed very broad, strong protections for actions they take on duty. The courts generally do not enforce a code of conduct on police and generally at trial the only impact of improper police behavior is exclusion of evidence. This generally makes arguing technical points of statute with a police officer a phenomenally futile act. If any of those technical points go to trial, it's going to be the judge who decides them.
In this case, all the judge has to do is say that such and such precedent says that protest can't be used as an end run against a no trespass order, and as the no trespass order was not issued in relation to protest activities, the statute did not abridge his right to protest. Poof, Gray's reading of the statute gets vaporized by a wave of the judge's wand.
Now, all of that is about how things are. I'll still say, I think there ought to be a harsher standard for police misconduct, but on the other hand, I also think that implies that trolling for police misconduct should have consequences.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday March 15 2016, @05:00AM
The "trespass order" is in retaliation for an exposé he did following a school bus crash. He found that bus drivers were not carrying out pre-trip inspections as required by law, and dumbly admitted to falsifying records, among other things. As a truck driver and CDL holder, he knows to take pre-trip inspections seriously. Local news media like news4jax [news4jax.com] also picked it up. It's very embarrassing for that school district. I expect the trespass order itself will not hold up under court scrutiny.
The pre-trip inspection investigation is an offshoot of public records audits that PINAC members like to do. In Florida in particular, there is a strong public records law, however compliance is bad (since most agencies don't encounter citizens well-informed of their right to public records) and enforcement is a long game [photographyisnotacrime.com]. The State Legislature could end up gutting the law to make it easier for corporations acting on behalf of the state to avoid public records requests. Note that the law allows you to request records where they are located, without going through a central office or PR person in some other location, and does not require you to identify yourself. Some of Gray's most recent public records audits have involved going into a school lobby and requesting access to inspect and photograph a binder of fire safety documents that is in plain view. Older audits at various locations test the very easiest public record to provide: the sign-in sheet in plain view of anybody who walks in. Reactions to these audits vary. Some will be very cooperative, others will be cooperative, but flustered or confused when Jeff Gray refuses to identify himself (not required by the Public Records Act [flhsmv.gov]), and others will flat-out refuse and call the cops for no reason. The encounters are recorded on video, often contradicting statements like "he was abusive and I felt threatened". Not recording these encounters is just plain risky, since public officials and law enforcement lie time and time again.
Ignoring the protest legality argument, since that's already been laid out here and may be decided in court, let's talk about your general attitude towards First Amendment audits.
Recording from public sidewalks or public right-of-ways is a First Amendment protected activity, and there should be no consequences for citizens that are so-called "trolling" for police misconduct. As can be seen in many Gray 1st Amendment audit videos [youtube.com] (or on similar channels [youtube.com]), the cops or building/prison/whatever security will be called, show up, and they do a little fishing. They always ask for identification. In most states, if you aren't being detained or arrested, you don't have to provide ID. The cops can't legally detain you without an articulable suspicion that a crime has occurred. That's a gray area, but if they aren't detaining you, you don't need to produce ID. They also like to pull the terrorism/ISIS card, attempting to shame the videographer, as if recording a police station from a public sidewalk is somehow indicative of terrorist activity.
The only "trolling" involved is on the part of the police. If you watch some of Gray's videos, you'll find that he is calm and polite. Ideally, cops/security wouldn't troll by approaching a videographer in the first place, since it is ridiculous to do so. However, if they do make a consensual contact, it's no problem if they ask to see ID, so as long as they accept "no" for an answer. If they repeatedly ask for ID, threaten to arrest for the non-crime of "not showing ID" (when no crime has been committed), or just generally harass the videographer, that's when they show the world (through YouTube) that they are thugs that are not used to citizens asserting their rights. While such police drama results in an interesting video and possibly some YouTube cash/donations, Gray and others have made it clear that they would rather not be approached or harassed. Yet the boys in blue fall for it... often. So who's the troll? The guy on the public sidewalk with a camera, or the cop attempting to harass and scare citizens into showing ID when they aren't obligated to? This is not counting the straight up brutality that might result, including false arrest, the use of the ultimate "contempt of cop" charge (yelling "stop resisting!" repeatedly and reflexively), or completely illegal attempts to delete footage from cameras. Some of these First Amendment audits have resulted in settlements forcing police departments to clarify policies by making it clear that citizens are allowed to film out in public, or requiring officers to go through additional training, which they clearly need.
If you ask me to select some specific/short videos for you to watch, I can do that later.
(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.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday March 17 2016, @01:12AM
U.S. Marines Accuse Man Photographing Base from Public Sidewalk of Breaking Federal Law [photographyisnotacrime.com]
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