San Diego Police Officer M. Reinhold, likely feeling vulnerable and angry that he was forced to go out in public wearing shorts rather than more appropriate calf-height leather boots and jodhpurs, had a peculiarly low threshold for fear. Or perhaps cellphone phobia, an ailment that disproportionately afflicts police officers.
Via Carlos Miller at Photography is not a Crime, Reinhold, seized with fear, seizes the vicious cellphone weapon.
Never forget the First Rule of Policing:
The person taking the video, Adam Pringle, who was caught red handed smoking on the boardwalk, spent the night in lockup. As unpleasant as that must have been, at least he was ultimately released, while M. Reinhold will be enshrined in perpetuity for wearing shorts on the job. And for the video as well.In the video below, Reinhold tells his friend that they are trained by the police department to suspect that cell phones can be converted into guns.
He also said that “officer safety” trumps the Constitution, meaning they can claim they are fear for their lives while they throw you in jail for any lame excuse.
Update: Covering the story, ABC News10 offers the insight of San Diego criminal defense attorney (and Harvard law grad!) Gretchen von Helms :
“There may be some issues here with this guy. He might have been getting to be a little too hostile for the cop’s liking.”Doesn’t every lawyer want to be on TV, no matter what? Hope it gets you lots of cases, Gretchen.Von Helms said it does not appear that Pringle’s First Amendment rights were infringed upon and added that the officer was probably in the right.
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Looking at the second video in Mr. Miller’s report, it seems that the officer does not object at all to being photographed or recorded as long as he is allowed to check the device to be sure it hasn’t been converted into a weapon. Assuming he’s sincere about this, he is not treating photography as a crime and bewailing the incident as an assault on the First Amendment is distracting attention from the real problem.
Reinhold says at one point that if someone is going to stand near him with a cell phone in hand, he wants to be sure it hasn’t been weaponized. But, for consistency, wouldn’t he have to apply the same principle to almost anything someone might be holding in their hands, such as a pen, umbrella, or briefcase? Does he believe that “officer safety” considerations would allow him to look inside the briefcase of a briefcase-toting smoker within 25 feet of a bus stop, just to be sure that it hadn’t been given a James Bond makeover? What about artificial limbs?
All of these things, and more, can be looked up on the internet, so perhaps Reinhold should take his own advice. The principles have been used in spy-kit toys for at least 50 years. SDPD is clearly failing to train its officers properly if it’s only alerting officers to the dangers of cell phones! How would Officer Reinhold feel if somebody were to shoot him with an umbrella while he’s examining their perfectly-ordinary phone? He needs to be made aware that any citizen he meets could be a walking arsenal so that he can take appropriate precautions!
I’m blaming the shorts. Any excuse not to be taped in shorts.
In the post-9/11 era you can never be too safe. He looks like a kid smoking a cigarette, but he might actually be Taliban. Probably why he left his bike helmet on, too. Otherwise that kid would have had a prime opportunity to thump his head with the phone-weapon.
Brave men like this bike cop risk their lives with dangerous people like this cigarette smoker every day. I, for one, am just thankful for his dedicated service.
Is that code for “he looks cute in shorts”?
More like code for “what moron takes a camera and doesn’t delete the recording?”
Hmmm. I wonder why the news would attempt to excuse the cop’s behavior in such an obviously contrived manner? Worried about their future access perhaps?
The symbiotic relationship between media and law enforcement is easy to explain. The relationship between pontificating criminal defense lawyers and law enforcement is a bit harder. The connection is that the lawyer wants to get on TV, and the way to get on TV is to give the media something that fits the narrative. Presto, everybody is happy, albeit stupider.
As one of the hip kids, I’m shocked to learn that none of these “But For Video™” cops has learned how to erase a video recording. Presumably, the cop took away the cellphone and held onto it to ensure that it wasn’t a weapon. No one in the precinct could show him how to erase the video?
These BFV™ cops are dinosaurs. Like some lawyers I know.
Victor
You are one of the hip kids. Maybe it was an iPhone, and the cop just wasn’t intuitive enough. That can happen, you know.
It doesn’t take any tech savvy at all to eliminate a phone video; it only takes the kind of brute force available to any dinosaur. The cop knocked the phone (Samsung Galaxy) to the ground and broke it before muckling onto Pringle, and Pringle’s friend picked it up. Reinhold never bothered to reclaim the evidence, perhaps assuming the video was already “erased,” but fortunately the phone was still usable enough that the video could be retrieved.
I wonder if Gretchen would still consider an officer to be in the right if he wanted to search HER cell phone (or briefcase, purse, backpack …) on the theory that it might have been weaponized. To me, the Fourth Amendment implications of this incident are FAR more horrifying than the First Amendment problems. This pretext doesn’t even require the cops to drag a drug-sniffing dog around with them.
Victor was making a joke, Brett. Take a deep breath.
What? You say there’s humor in Victor’s assertion that only hip kids can deal with tech evolution but none in my counterclaim that unhip dinosaurs have their own ways of coping and can’t be counted among the extinct quite yet? Wow. One of us needs to check in at the nearest Clinic for the Humor Impaired, but I’m not as certain as you are that the one is me. Not being a member of the lawyerly class, I guess I’d better find representation lest I be involuntarily committed. Would the humorosity of blog comments be considered a speech issue? Perhaps I should ask over at Popehat.
(Captcha: which endyWk. Hmmm. Sounds like a most improper question when we hardly know each other.)
When it is illegal to carry any kind of weapon, only criminals will have cell phones.