Here is a very awkward 25 minute video of a journalist who videotapes a police academy building in Albany, NY. He is being confronted by officers who don’t want him there. Cautiously they push and try to intimidate him, but he obviously knows his rights.

Photography is not a Crime.

When I see videos like this I can certainly understand the motives of the officers. They cannot detain him for not showing identification on public property, and they can’t quite determine, just standing there, whether he is indeed on public property. That puts them in a bind. They also know quite well that if they make a mistake they could end up on 60 Minutes and what officer wants to be there?

I can understand their concerns in a day and age where nutcases like Timothy McVey blow up buildings of the federal government and kill over 100 people, many of them children in daycare; or in an age where teenage shooters go on campuses with guns ablaze killing random students because random girls chose to avoid him.

If somebody was found taking videos of a police academy one day, and nobody apprehended him, and he then went on a bombing spree six months later, heads would roll and the officers in the video would be out of a job and career.

The journalist was in his right to be there, doing what he was doing. The police did what they thought was necessary, and certainly tried to intimidate him.

I would suspect the journalist was not black or middle-eastern looking. It might have ended differently. We tend to profile people based on our prejudices.

I do not know if the journalist was completely in his right. I do not know if the police officers acted appropriately. I do know that we live in a complicated world, where people’s rights all too often are limited by government and authority.

When in doubt, I tend to side with the people. I don’t want to live in a police state, even though with the goings on at the NSA and the behavior of the local police, as seen in this video, I am not sure I don’t already live in one.

The people in Germany in January 1933 didn’t know they lived in a police state. However, with the powers provided to a single man at the end of January innocuously, that changed within a matter of weeks, and suddenly no one but the “authorities” had any rights left.

I am not insinuating here that we’re at the stage where Germany was in 1933. I do think, however, that it’s a very slippery slope, between government interfering with the rights of people, and government brutalizing people.