Tuesday 3 August 2010

Hackney shooting photographer threatened by police

According to this report on the National Union of Journalist's website a photographer for the Hackney Gazette was manhandled by a police sergeant and had photographs forcefully deleted from her camera.

I'm assuming that this happened soon after the shooting on Saturday (Hackney Hive version).

The NUJ reported: "A police Sergeant approached Valino telling her that she was disrupting a police investigation and to hand over her camera. After protesting to the Sergeant that she was in a public place, outside the cordon he had no right to take her camera, he grabbed her wrist and pulled out his handcuffs. Before he could put the cuffs on she handed him her camera. He then left for five minutes before coming back, bringing Valino inside the cordon and asking her to show him the images and deleting them. Valino was told that she could come back in a few hours to photograph the scene."

2 comments:

  1. Hope this does not become a common thing, what happened to "freedom of the press" I can understand somethings would be best published at a certain time ie after relatives are informed in the case of a tragedy, but that should be down to the editor. I understand even the papers get it wrong, in the case of Cerys Potter they printed a picture of someone else with the same name which was supplied by a news agency but to stop the photographer in a public place might be going too far. Time will tell I guess but if that happens when the police decide, then people will start to believe in cover ups.

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  2. This is the police comment which I just lifted from Hackney Hive - “Hackney Police is aware of the incident and is currently looking into the circumstances.
    ‘It is clearly not the intention of the MPS to prevent people taking photographs. Our officers do receive guidance around the issue of photography through briefings and internal communications and we continue to drive this work forward.
    ‘It is therefore disappointing when this guidance in not followed correctly.”

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