I suppose if the photographer wanted to be left alone by the UK police he should have taken to looting, ransacking, and destroying downtown shopping establishments.
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But, we’re okay taking photographs here in the US, right?
Not in Long Beach, California, where the police department seems to think they have the right to detain photographers they deem to be taking photographs “with no apparent esthetic value.”
I suppose the new LBPD motto is to “protect and serve… and provide art criticism.”
A few thoughts, stemming from the murderous rampage at Fort Hood.
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While some are cautioning us to not immediately make a radical Muslim connection with the fact that the alleged killer is an Arab American, one has to wonder at how quickly the label “Right-Wing-Extremist” would have been applied had the mass murderer been white.
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It appears that the alleged killer was stopped by shots fired from a civilian police officer. Per CNN,
A civilian police officer who shot the Fort Hood gunman four times during his bloody rampage stopped the attacker cold, a U.S. Army official said Friday.
Officer Kimberly Munley of the Fort Hood Police Department is a “trained, active first responder” who acted quickly after she “just happened to encounter the gunman,” said Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, Fort Hood’s commanding general.
Cone said the officer and her partner responded “very quickly” to the scene of the shootings — reportedly in around three minutes.
One point of clarification, if Officer Munley was on duty, and responded quickly to the situation, she was a second responder (which in no way diminishes from her courageous actions). First responders would be those initially and directly under fire.
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President Obama continues, unfortunately, to approach serious issues in amateur fashion. In the video below, consider the fact that Obama took nearly two minutes to actually get to the topic of the shooting at Fort Hood. Evidently, he thought that giving various “shout-outs” had a higher priority.
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Update: More on courageous Officer Munley who, in addition to responding to the scene quickly, immediately engaged the situation, thereby stopping the killer.
Munley’s toughness and grace under pressure were on display Thursday when she and her partner responded within three minutes of reported gunfire, said Army Lt. Gen. Bob Cone.
Munley, who had been trained in active-response tactics, rushed into the building and confronted the shooter as he was turning a corner, Cone said.
“It was an amazing and an aggressive performance by this police officer,” Cone said.
