In separate recent incidents it appears that California is escalating its war against photographers. The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports that a Park Ranger forced a photographer to stop taking pictures of his family because his equipment appeared to be too professional. According to the story:

the ranger motioned McGhee’s family over to the base of the pier, where the law enforcement officer was talking to a man who had been photographing his family with a Nikon SLR camera.

“We didn’t become irate or anything like that, we just told him it was not a commercial venture. It was just our family and we were doing Christmas cards,” McGhee said. “He said it didn’t matter and if we wanted to shoot, we had to go to the district office and get a permit.”

The ranger also ran their names through a criminal records search to make sure they didn’t have outstanding warrants, according to McGhee. He received a verbal warning not to conduct commercial shoots — even though his wasn’t —

This follows an even more disturbing story of a photographer who was harassed and threatened by police for taking pictures of the San Jose train station. According to the photographer’s blog:

I heard someone shout “TURN AROUND SLOWLY!”

I said “excuse me?” confusedly, and then slowly turned around. To my surprise, two police officers were staring at me. They asked what I was “suspiciously photographing industrial stuff for…”
I replied with something along the lines of “What?” and then they proceeded to collect my IDs and vehicle information (I was parked in another lot entirely). They also asked for my social security number, and took photographs of me, to which I said “is this really necessary??” and was told “absolutely.” They agreed there was nothing illegal about my activity, but said they needed to make a “full report of the incident.”

Besides the over 30 minutes of questioning what is even more disturbing is that the police demanded and received “permission” to copy the contents of the photographer’s memory card without a proper search warrant.

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