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[SalmonGod]

I was introduced to this stuff regarding filming of police a few months ago.  The person who showed it to me also had the best response -- "It's now our duty to raise a legal shit storm anytime an officer is caught on camera doing something positive."

[mainiac]

Please do that in states where it's still legal.

[Truean]

And lobby the legislature to change it in states it is not.... [sigh, still in disbelief that any attorney thinks this holds water]

[MetalSlimeHunt]

And lobby the legislature to change it in states it is not.... [sigh, still in disbelief that any attorney thinks this holds water]

A Supreme Court ruling would be even better (and probably pretty likely to succeed), seeing as it would prevent any new laws of this kind from coming about. Well, at least until a state finds a loophole to exploit. I guess the whole problem with that would be the likelihood of a case about it being accepted by the SC.

[Truean]

And lobby the legislature to change it in states it is not.... [sigh, still in disbelief that any attorney thinks this holds water]

A Supreme Court ruling would be even better (and probably pretty likely to succeed), seeing as it would prevent any new laws of this kind from coming about. Well, at least until a state finds a loophole to exploit. I guess the whole problem with that would be the likelihood of it being accepted by the SC.

Yes but, Supreme Court Ruling:

1.) Only at the SCOTUS's option;
2.) Only after trial, appellate, and full appeals process exhausted = years and years in the making;
3.) There's always a gamble in litigation, no matter what.
4.) Legislatures can trump state courts and stop individual judges immediately.

That said, yes, I would like SCOTUS to do this, and I'd jump at the chance.

[Osmosis Jones]

So, was walking through my Uni today, and saw some fresh flyers. The Occupy movement has spread to Melbourne, Australia.

I'm actually curious to see how far it will go here; from an objective sense, I doubt we have much to complain about. Our wealth distribution is far more equitable, we have a satisfactory public education system (including heavily subsidised tertiary education) and our public healthcare system isn't a hideously broken clusterfuck. While I do have several gripes with our politicians, who doesn't?

So, all in all, I'm worried that we'll just have a pointless movement that's sole motivation is to jump on the bandwagon. That's bad because it then serves to undercut the impact of more legitimate protest in the future.

[Heron TSG]

I don't know where the first Appeals Court circuit is, but they upheld the right of citizens to film cops. The idea being that there is no difference between a blogger's journalism and a corporation's journalism.

[Truean]

I don't know where the first Appeals Court circuit is, but they upheld the right of citizens to film cops. The idea being that there is no difference between a blogger's journalism and a corporation's journalism.

Mass. State:
http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_courts_of_appeals

That would explain why I had never heard of these kinds of laws and was so shocked by them. I'm not saying Metal is wrong necessarily. It could be a split in decisions between the circuit courts. I'm only familiar with the 6th circuit. The first circuit court only governs those courts in its geographic jurisdiction. The second district and all other districts are not bound by first district decisions and vice versa. If there is a disagreement between the federal appellate jurisdictions, then that would be something SCOTUS should resolve for uniformity, but unfortunately, it is rather complex procedurally: standing, process, appellate work... it's a mess. You can actually have different rulings in different federal circuits and thus the law is not uniform.... This is the difference between binding and non binding (persuasive) precedent cases: binding case law comes from your jurisdiction. Thus, your civics teacher was wrong, judges do make law: case law to be followed by cases that may arise later....

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I guess we should count ourselves lucky that the blatently unconstitutional laws are the ones that tend to end up in a tangled, self-contradictory, ambiguous web of legality until the Supreme Court usually dismisses them.

[SalmonGod]

Watching live as mass arrests are about to take place in Denver... supposedly... police have shown up on camera addressing the crowd, but someone is narrating the feed and drowning out any audio from the actual event.  People who are there are saying 50 police in riot gear have arrived and are standing by.

Edit:  It's beginning.  No arrests yet, but the riot gears have moved into the crowd and are spreading out amongst them in small groups.

[Aqizzar]

The feed won't stay live for me.  I think the link is being overloaded, or they fucked up the page when they tried to change the comment scroll to Moderators Only.

They could lose the dual-channel picture-in-picture too, that's really distracting.

ACTUALLY, YOU'RE THE 47%

This is kind of hilarious.

A little too smarmy in a couple places, but still fantastic.

[SalmonGod]

It's pretty crazy... 1930 viewers and rising... this on just 45 min notice from a few people running around to different communication channels going "hey shit's going down in Denver"

So far all the police are doing is breaking down tents.

This looks like a much better feed.

[Aqizzar]

I think the important thing is the police in full riot gear walking in singles and small numbers through the crowd.  That is definitely a big no-no in crowd control, which to me is a sign that they are utterly confident in things not turning violent, that they're just following procedure.  The taking down tents is an interesting move, but I'll wait for a statement.

Hmm, now they're "seizing property", and uh oh, cheering just broke out.  I wish I could hear the PA.

Dome-tents are really hard to dismantle in a timely fashion.

[SalmonGod]

It is an interesting scene... not your typical confrontation... it seems like both authorities and protesters are doing their best to tread lightly around one another.

Anyone who has been watching this movement, but don't know how best to get involved, it looks like Denver is going to need a lot of supplies.  Police are taking everything and declaring it "non-recoverable", so they're going to be re-building from scratch.

Apparently, the media tent was the first to be torn down, which has people saying that there's been infiltration.  Not that it would be difficult for someone in plain clothes to just walk around for a bit and identify key points like that.  I do find it frustrating how much people seem to be over reacting to things.

Now the crowd is being ordered to leave the area, so there may be some confrontation soon.

Damn, that's an impressive mohawk

[Aqizzar]

Damn, that's an impressive mohawk

Hell yeah it was.  EDIT: I think that's a chick, whoa.

They're saying that the newsdesk has reports of people being arrested, but there's no video.  The reporter narrating claims he walked around earlier and smelled at least a couple people smoking weed.  The police also said they would confiscate any "unattended" animals and children, to be given to the SPCA and Child Services respectively.  There don't appear to be any children present at the time.

Now they're basically trying to stall the police for the next hour, when the park officially opens at 5AM Mountain.

Okay, the police did seize the tents and probably some other stuff, but they agreed to give the food back and leave the medical tent standing.  There's also about a half-dozen Anarchists running around, but the crowd is kinda pushing them out on their own.

Aaand... the police kinda disappeared.  They're spread so thin and few with the crowd starting to build again that they're hard to find now.  There was one guy who tried to pose with a cop to get his picture taken, and the cop kinda warded him off but didn't do anything, and some people got the guy out of there.