Photographs of Police Officers in Public Places
Further information: Legality of recording by civilians Further information: Photography and the lawSection 76 (Offences relating to information about members of armed forces etc.) came into force on 15 February 2009 making it an offence to elicit, attempt to elicit, or publish information "of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism" about:
- a member of Her Majesty's Armed Forces,
- a constable,
- the Security Service,
- the Secret Intelligence Service, or
- Government Communications Headquarters.
Any person found guilty faces 10 years imprisonment and an unlimited fine. It is a defence for a person charged with this offence to prove that they had a reasonable excuse for their action (for example, a newspaper feature on police brutality or corruption).
There are exemptions for communications service providers, web caches and web hosting services.
Journalists who feared that this law would be abused by the police to threaten the taking of photographs of their activities staged a mass protest outside Scotland Yard in February 2009. Gordon Brown reaffirmed that the police have a legal right to restrict photography in public places, and stated "the law applies to photographers as it does to anybody else in a public place". The act however does not lay out restrictions for the photography of Community Support Officers as they do not hold the office of Constable.
The Parliamentary debate on this law was limited because in earlier versions of the Bill the offence of eliciting or publishing information "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism" only applied to people who were or had been members of Her Majesty’s Forces, and not to the police. This was also the case throughout the debate in the Standing Committee.
(An opposition amendment changing the phrase "of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism" with the words "with the intention that it is useful..." was withdrawn after the Minister explained that the clause merely restated earlier laws applying to the armed forces on which there was already case law that made it more reasonable than it appeared.)
The law against eliciting or publishing information "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism" was extended to encompass police constables in a raft of unscrutinized amendments that passed into the Bill at the end of the debate when the Parliamentary timetable (which had been voted on earlier in the day) expired.
When this clause was scrutinized in the House of Lords, and in all subsequent debates, no reference was made to the extension of the law to include police constables.
A Parliamentary written question about the policy regarding police preventing members of the public from taking photographs in public places hasn't been answered. But the Home Office issued a circular to the police in 2009 which reminds them that 'Legitimate journalistic activity (such as covering a demonstration for a newspaper) is likely to constitute such an excuse. Similarly an innocent tourist or other sight-seer taking a photograph of a police officer is likely to have a reasonable excuse.'
Read more about this topic: Counter-Terrorism Act 2008
Famous quotes containing the words photographs of, photographs, police, officers, public and/or places:
“No one lives in this room
without confronting the whiteness of the wall
behind the poems, planks of books,
photographs of dead heroines.
Without contemplating last and late
the true nature of poetry. The drive
to connect. The dream of a common language.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this—as in other ways—they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“I am both a public and a private school boy myself, having always changed schools just as the class in English in the new school was taking up Silas Marner, with the result that it was the only book in the English language that I knew until I was eighteen—but, boy, did I know Silas Marner!”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)