
This is part of what I recovered of the pictures that the Calgary Police Service (working with a private security company) forced me to "delete". Unfortunately, I seem to have permanently lost most of the image data (both missing whole images and most data in the two that survived). In a weird quirk, my camera’s habit of frequently "freezing" and corrupting images, is what might have saved this image. My camera can’t display corrupted images like this (I cropped out the bad part), so this appeared all black, during the review for images to be deleted. The good images, seem to be unrecoverable.
I was going home Sunday, July 19, 2009, walking West along 8 Avenue SW, about to cross 1 Street SE, and saw an apparent arrest.
The security guard on the left said the pictures I took didn’t belong to me, and I wasn’t allowed to have any of the images, and they’d have to be deleted.
Then, the other security guy talked to a cop, who said it was ok for me to go, with the images, saying the first security person "misspoke".
Then, the next cop, said I couldn’t leave with an image that’s potential evidence. So, I would have to delete it, if I didn’t want to lose my camera for a year. When I said it would be illegal to delete evidence, they said it wasn’t evidence if it’s deleted. Make sense?
Basically, the police don’t want independent observers. They want to be the sole source of the "truth".
Everybody is welcome and encouraged to freely copy this image, provided you credit me.
Update: This incident was covered in an article by Krista Sylvester, published in the Wednesday, July 22, 2009 edition of Metro News Calgary.
Photographer: Robert Thivierge
Date Taken | 2009-07-19 16:40:00 |
FlickR Views | 33,361 |
FlickR Faves | 0 |
Location | 51.045441,-114.060262 |
This page was created by Rob’s FlickR Importer on August 6, 2024 @ 3:00 pm EDT.