They'll come for both your guns and your camcorders

The police don't like guns and camcorders for the same reason: they give people a means to fight back.

A Roman Catholic priest who monitors law enforcement treatment of minorities with a video camera released footage that appears to contradict the police account of his own arrest.

A police report says the Rev. James Manship was confronted and arrested Feb. 19 because he was holding an "unknown shiny silver object" and struggled with an officer who was trying to take it from him. But a 15-second video released this week by Manship's attorneys shows East Haven police Officer David Cari asking Manship, "Is there a reason you have a camera on me?"

"I'm taking a video of what's going on here," Manship replies.

"Well, I'll tell you what, what I'm going to do with that camera," Cari says as he approaches the priest. The tape then goes blank.

That's probably going to look really good to a jury. You have a Roman Catholic priest who wasn't breaking any laws, and a cop who wasn't being directly accused of breaking any laws who got rough with the priest. Clearly, the officer had something to hide, otherwise he wouldn't have taken the priest's camcorder away from him. The police allow the media to follow them all the time on shows like Cops, and those police are never bothered by people recording their actions as they carry out their lawful duties.

The marked hostility of the officer will certainly not help his case because the priest was not interfering with his ability to perform his duties. In fact, the defense should argue that if the officer had nothing to hide, and was obeying the relevant laws, the video would have been evidence in defense of the department in the event that a Hispanic detainee filed a false claim of mistreatment.

Keefe [the police department's attorney] criticized Manship for "creating controversy where none needed to be."

"You've got to conclude that he was out there with a video camera in an attempt, in my view, to provoke the police to do something," Keefe said. "If his goal was to attempt to stop the perceived harassment of the Hispanic community in East Haven by the police department, why didn't he go to the mayor's office?"

That certainly is a novel new legal theory: pointing a camera or camcorder at someone is tantamount to going up to them, getting in their face aggressively and using "fighting words." It's good thing people don't usually pack heat at tourist sites, but God knows that if this legal theory holds up, there will be bloodshed and mayhem as amateur photographers and those who happen to get in their pictures wage a never-ending war over being caught up in amateur photography.

In any case, there is a relationship between camcorders, cameras and guns that advocates of liberty need to defend. Hostility toward guns is already strong in much of Europe, but now the governments are starting to slowly turn a hostile eye toward recording the police (I'm lazy, and that's the first link I noticed on Google) as well.