Kevin Moore, the man who shot the video of Freddie Gray’s arrest by Baltimore police, was himself arrested on Thursday at gunpoint.
The circumstances surrounding the arrest are unclear, but Moore claims the police have been harassing him since his video went viral.
It’s believed police detained Moore Thursday night along with two other people after handing over a copy of this video to detectives with the department’s Office of Internal Oversight.
Photography is Not a Crime reports authorities took Moore into custody at gunpoint during a traffic stop. He was released two hours later.
It’s not clear what charges Moore faces, but the Baltimore Sun previously reported that police wanted Moore for questioning.
An image from surveillance footage was released by Baltimore police showing Moore at the site of Gray’s capture, an intimidation tactic, Moore believed.
“They plastered my face all over the Internet like (they) don’t know who I am when (they) very well know who I am,” Moore told Photography is Not a Crime after his arrest.
The two suspects, identified as Chad Jackson and Tony White, by Counter Current News, are members of We Cop Watch.
I would urge caution in that we are only getting one side of the story, told by activists with a stake in proving police wrongdoing.
But from what I’ve read about the Baltimore Police Department over the last two weeks, harassment wouldn’t surprise me a bit. This is a police department as dysfunctional as any big city police department in the country, including New Orleans, which is known as a cesspool of corruption and bad behavior.
But we don’t know if Moore is wanted for another crime, or whether the police just wanted to “question” him about his video. Needless to say, drawing a gun on Moore seems a little extreme if all they wanted to do was question him. More intimidation? Unknown at this time.
Incidents involving citizens who are placed under arrest simply for filming police in action are happening with disturbing frequency. The standard appears to be a “reasonable” belief by the police that the citizen is interfering or otherwise in the way. For the most part, courts have been siding with law enforcement on this issue. But there’s a line between cops who are genuinely concerned about the safety of onlookers and police trying to cover up wrongdoing.
Proving the latter is very difficult.
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