Liberty, Equality and Big Brotherhood: Citizen Journalism Outlawed in France
On March 3, 1991, African American taxi driver Rodney King was stopped by four LAPD officers for speeding after an alleged high speed chase. When King refused to assume the felony prone position, the four police officers fired a taser, and started kicking and beating him repeatedly with their batons. King suffered a fractured skull and internal injuries in the attack. George Holliday, an Argentinian immigrant who lived in a nearby apartment, captured the incident with his video camera, which was broadcast on different networks on the same day. Charge of felony evasion against King was later dropped, and the four officers were indicted for assault. A year later, on April 29, despite the obvious excess use of extreme force witnessed by the world, three of the officers were acquitted by a predominantly white jury (one Latin and one Asian out of twelve). Hours after the verdict one of the worst riots in Los Angeles history erupted, which lasted four days, causing more than 50 deaths, over 2300 injuries and over 7000 arrests. The case against the four officers was reopened and two of the four officers, Powell and Koon were found guilty and sentenced to 30 months in federal correctional camps.
Years later at a gas station an African American approached Holliday and said, “Yeah, you don’t recognized me.” “No,” replied Holliday. “You saved my life,” said Rodney King.
Ironically, 16 years later, on the exact same day of the police brutality against King, the French Constitutional Council should approve a law criminalizing filming and broadcasting violent acts by ordinary citizens that are not “professional journalists”. The Law, proposed by Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, a 2007 presidential candidate from the conservative right wing UMP, aims to curb the rise of juvenile delinquency in France, where several incidents were reported in which teenagers physically attack or sexually abuse their victims while friends record the crime with a mobile phone and later circulate the videos on the Internet. According the new Delinquency Prevention Law, if the recording of violent acts or the dissemination of it is not “the results of normal practice of a profession having the aim of informing the public” nor is “carried out in order to be used as evidence in justice”, it will be a punishable act: Were Holliday as an accidental bystander to film in France today what he’d witnessed 16 years ago, he’d be sentenced to up to 5 years in prison or given a 75000 € fine.
It’s not difficult to see the complications that come with this law:
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