I am obliged to The Lone Voice for reference to this item from Urban75. It is a guide to what photographers are legally allowed to do.
However, despite what the law says, this sort of thing is still happening, and the response in some circles to police being inconvenienced by the publication of footage of their behaviour suggests that it’s going to keep on happening.
One of the curious aspects of this concerns the controversial Google Street View concern, which sends camera cars along public roads (quite legally) to photograph everything and everyone.
Questions arising from this activity include:
Why, when a Google car photographs a school, does not a ravening mob of Sun-reading parents, apparently happy to be forbidden to photograph their own children and to pay schools substantial sums (plus VAT) to do the job for them, crucify its driver and set it alight, with cries of “Paedophile!”?
Why, when a Google car photographs any one of the dozens of ’security subjects’ which are forbidden to us mere mortals, is it not seized and its pictures erased?
Why, when a Google car photographs a police officer, is its driver not harrassed and intimidated?
What use will be made of Google car photographs of everyone’s house by local authorities, as evidence to justify obtaining yet more non-council-tax income by fining people for petty technical infractions of various kinds (planning laws, bincrime, having a scruffy front garden, etc. etc.)?
What use will be made of Google car photographs (which appear to be capable of resolving both faces and vehicle index numbers) by the police?
What other relationship, if any, exists between this foreign corporation (which apparently feels itself obliged to declare publicly that it is ‘not evil’) and the British state?
Of course, what Google are doing is perfectly legal. They take pictures only from public highways, and are allowed to do so. As, in theory, are we. It’s just that if we actually try doing it we get into some kind of trouble.
So the photographers’ freedoms outlined by Urban75 appear to apply only to Messrs. Google, and not to ourselves. One cannot help but wonder why.
In the words of the great Sir Arthur C. Clarke:
“I have a bad feeling about this.”
“You do, huh?”
“Yup.”
[2001]
Oh, it’s not just the police. The plastic police want in on this too:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1170374/Terror-quiz-man-took-photo-police-car.html
The fact that the anti-photography campaign is intended to prevent the capture of images of police misbehaviour ought to be intuitively apparent to anyone with more than half a brain; what concerns me now is how Google are paying off for their apparent immunity from this sort of harrassment.