Barnstable police officer Gretchen Allen: “I swear… take one more photo and I’ll take that camera and smash it in your face.” Photo by Robert Bastille
see the video and read the entire story at: http://photographyisnotacrime.com/2013/09/03
A Massachusetts cop threatened to smash a camera into a man’s face if he dared take one more photograph of her. Instead, he started video recording her.
The video shows Barnstable police officer Gretchen Allen walking away from Robert Bastille, who runs a local news site called Hyannis News.
“You’re going to hit me?” Bastille can be heard saying. “I”m sorry, you’re going to threaten me, officer?”
“Are you trying to cause a scene right now cause I’ll arrest you for disorderly instead,” an obviously distraught Allen tells Bastille.
Instead of what? Smashing the camera in his face?
According to Bastille, her exact words, which prompted him to turn on his video camera, were, “I swear… take one more photo and I’ll take that camera and smash it in your face.”
In the video, Bastille continues to berate her for threatening him, an allegation she never denies.
She instead calls for back-up and orders him to “stop taking my photograph.”
Meanwhile, some clueless wanker walks up and tells him to “be nice to the officer, be a gentleman.”
After a minute when it dawned on her that he was shooting video and not taking photos, she informed him that it was illegal to record her.
“Are you recording right now?” she asks.
“I am videotaping, which is within my Constitutional rights,” he responds.
“It most certainly is not,” he replies.
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