Teen's arrest for filming police marks an alarming trend

I am fed up with Georgia, and want to move elsewhere, after I get things organized, but don't know where. Obviously, Newark will not be on my list!

http://digitallife.today.com/_news/2011/05/20/6682855-teens-arrest-for-filming-police-marks-an-alarming-trend

5/20/2011
By Suzanne Choney

A high school student who used her cell phone to take video of police on a city bus was arrested by police and taken into custody after she refused to turn her cell phone off. Police later released her, but not before they erased the video on the teen's phone.

University High School junior class president Khaliah Fitchette was on her way home from school with friends, riding a Newark city bus when a passenger fell from from his seat onto the floor. Police were called to the scene, and as passengers aboard the bus waited, Fitchette used her cell phone video camera to record what was happening. One of the officers told the then-16-year-old not only to stop taking video, but to turn off her phone. She refused to turn the device off, and the officer grabbed Fitchette by the wrist and pulled her off the bus.

She was handcuffed, put in the police car and taken to detention facilities (first a juvenile one, then an adult facility), and during that time the second police officer who was there erased Fitchette's cellphone video. When the two officers realized they had no basis for detaining or arresting Fitchette, they drove her to her mother's workplace, where they dropped her off.

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Newark's Police Department has a history of heavy-handedness around this issue.

Fitchette's case — the incident happened March 28, 2010 — "marks the third time in as many years when Newark Police have been accused of mistreating residents who were attempting to film them," according to the Star-Ledger. "In 2009, the editor of the Brazilian Voice newspaper sued the department for confiscating a photographer’s camera and handcuffing him to a bench at a police precinct after he photographed a dead body.

"Special police officer Brian Sharif was the subject of a lawsuit two years ago after CBS camerman James Quodomine claimed Sharif placed him in a chokehold and handcuffed him while he was filming a city anti-violence protest in 2008."

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