A commercial photographer taking pictures in the Coney Island area was forced to involuntarily surrender his film by a police officer who displayed total contempt and disregard for the law. According to the story which appears in the Village Voice:

As if he were in a police state, Lund was intimidated by a cop into giving up his film, even though he was doing nothing wrong and wasn’t formally accused of anything.

The story continues:

NYPD officials declined to comment for this story, but several allegations of the cops’ heavy-handed behavior toward photographers have been documented. The NYCLU has filed several lawsuits against the NYPD, accusing them of violating First Amendment rights in its harassment of photographers. One of the suits, Sharma v. NYPD, was filed in January 2006, when Indian filmmaker Rakesh Sharma, who was shooting taxis in midtown, was stopped by police and detained for several hours, during which he was quizzed about “terrorist” activities. That August, the suit was expanded at the NYCLU’s request to include a slew of photographers.

“Photographers and filmmakers have been unlawfully detained, searched, and threatened with arrest if they would not disclose or destroy their film,” the Sharma suit contends, adding that the harassment, ominously, doesn’t always end there. “Photographers have also been subjected to a second round of questioning by members of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division,” the suit alleges.

Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD are on notice that the harassment of photographers is a serious issue yet they deliberately choose to do nothing to resolve it. On the contrary…

“We’re quite confident that the NYPD has told its police officers, in one way or another, that they should be paying very, very close attention to photographers,” says Christopher Dunn, the NYCLU’s associate legal director. “But they haven’t been given clear directions on the limits in which they have to conduct those investigations. Police officers are not allowed to look at images without consent of the photographer, and they have no authority to order someone to let them look at their pictures or to confiscate their film. And it happens all the time.”

Officials at the CCRB and the NYCLU say that complaints about the police approaching people taking pictures and either demanding to see their photos or seizing and destroying them have been on the rise ever since 9/11.

The only way the NYPD and the Mayor’s Office will be stopped from engaging in this war against photographers will be if these lawsuits result in HEFTY MONETARY DAMAGES against the City Of New York. Unfortunately the city has no intention of obeying the law by any other means.

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