"A public Troy New York ice skating rink has decided that photography should not be allowed unless approved by their Executive Director. At least one parent says she’s being arbitrarily discriminated against and not being allowed to film her own kid at the public rink."
James V. Franco writes in the Troy Record:
Jean Hetman, who has a 13-year-old daughter who practices figure skating at the arena, said she has been video taping and photographing her daughter’s routines for about six years, but now she is being told she cannot, and even had the police called on her twice.
"I am more than willing to show my ID and go through whatever mechanism they want to use to determine who is a pedophile and who is not," she said "When it gets right down to it, I can take a photo of whoever I feel like taking a picture of. When you are in a public place you have no right of privacy."
The city maintains the new policy is to protect children from pedophiles.
Melanie Trimble, NYCLU [New York Civil Liberties Union] executive director, said the rink is a public place and Hetman is within her rights to photograph children skating. Furthermore, she said the policy, although unnecessary and probably illegal, is not being applied fairly because Recreation Director George Rogers twice denied Hetman permission while granting other parents permission to do the same thing…
Again: WTF??!? I’m no lawyer, but in the US, public place = right to photograph. As Ms. Hetman said, "When it gets right down to it, I can take a photo of whoever I feel like taking a picture of. When you are in a public place you have no right of privacy." End of story. Hetman is bending over backwards to meet on middle ground as it is: she’s willing to show identification to exercise a legal right! This bogus policy needs to end and Rogers needs to be fired immediately.
This is outrageous, whether you care about photography or not. You don’t get to go around just making up laws because you feel like it. As far as I’m concerned, this is actually worse than somebody arbitrarily declaring wearing-jeans-is-a-felony-Mondays because the courts have explicitly and repeatedly upheld the right to photograph in public places, whereas they haven’t, as far as I know, the right to wear jeans.
I’m curious about what happend when the police were called. Some random clown trying to legislate from the rink is bad enough, but it’s far worse if the police are actually enforcing it.
If you take photos in the US—yes, even you with the camera phone—have a look at attorney Bert P. Krages‘ downloadable flyer, The Photographer’s Right – Your Rights When You Are Stopped or Confronted for Photography. And don’t believe the hype: there’s nothing at all about photography in the original (HR3162, 2001) or reauthorized (HR3199, 2005) versions of the Patriot Act.
For the UK, get the downloadable UK Photographers Rights Guide; for Oz, grab NSW Photographer’s Rights. (If anyone knows of similar sheets for other countries, please let me know!)
Coverage:
Read article at troyrecord.com
Video of local WNYT news coverage (WMV)
Thomas Hawk’s commentary
Bill Pytlovany’s commentary
Via Digg
Although I do agree with you about the right to photograph in a public place, please let me caution you about adopting Jean Hetman as the poster child for your cause.
There are two separate issues here. Jean Hetman has been successful in focusing attention on one of them – the right to photograph in public places.
The other issue is Ms Hetman’s repeated attempts to harass and annoy children, coaches, parents and staff (anyone who she sees as her foe)at
the Knickerbacker arena and at other locations.
She uses the camera, her cell phone, loud abusive comments, and spreads false information
to harass and annoy others.
She is not at all “bending over backwards to meet on middle ground” as you say, but is actually following children outside the rink to photograph them in the parking lot. She also photographs children while they are eating, changing shoes, sitting in the bleachers, etc. She follows and photographs young children from the time they arrive until they leave the rink. For the past several months she has taken hundreds (or thousands) of photographs of the same few children in an attempt to drive them away from this skating rink. She has done the same thing to other children at the Clifton Park skating rink, and at a dance school in Massachusetts.
She uses the camera as a tool to intimidate young children, their coaches and parents.
The new rule at the rink to require permision to photograph is a well intentioned effort by the staff to limit Ms Hetman’s abusive behavior.
The better way to deal with this would to charge her with criminal harassment, but so far the Troy Police Dept has declined to involve itself with tbis problem.
You’re right about freedom to take photographs but your very wrong if you believe that Jean Hetman is a victim here.
Oh, I don’t think she’s a hero and I’m not aiming to make her a poster child for anything. But the simple fact is that rights are being illegally curtailed, and that is unacceptable.
As you said, there are two separate issues here. My statement about her bending over backwards only applies to the legal one: she’s willing to go beyond the requirements of the law and provide identification to exercise her rights.
You seem to have first-hand knowledge of the situation that I don’t. Hetman may well be the biggest jerk on the planet, but that’s irrelevant for the purposes of this conversation. Unless it rises to the level of harassment, being a jerk is not illegal while denying someone their explicitly court-upheld rights is. End of story. In that sense, she most definitely is a victim. Maybe not a sympathetic one, but a victim nonetheless, along with everyone else who now “has to” ask permission.
Hetman may be rude, but Rogers declaring himself legislative, judicial, and excutive branches of a public rink is not an acceptable or legal way to solve this problem. Trying to solve one wrong with a bigger one doesn’t make a right.
The way to deal with this is through the police. If they’re unresponsive, file a complaint. If what Hetman does doesn’t rise to the legal definition of harassment (I suspect that having the police repeatedly called on you for doing something completely legal does), people can either choose to come to the rink and deal with it or to go somewhere else. It doesn’t sound like an appealing choice to me, but it’s the choice they have. The price we pay for being able to do the things that we like to do that annoy other people—like bringing screaming children to restaurants or waiting 10 rings to answer your mobile phone—is dealing with it or leaving ourselves.
In your reply you write that you suspect that “having the police repeatedly called on you for doing something completely legal” rises to the legal definition of harassment. Of course you are entitled to your opinion – we all have an opinion – but why do you insist on making comments such as this when your knowledge is based only on very limited and one sided information concerning the complaints against Hetman? The police were called only twice during the past 6 months that Ms Hetman has been
targeting children for harassment. Twice. Yes, two times in six months. This is public record.
I called once two months ago and the rink manager called another time when my family was not at the rink and Ms Hetman was bothering someone else.
Ok, if you want to call that “repeatedly” it does add a bit more drama and emotion to your argument. But I think that most would agree that two calls to the police over a six month period of constant harassment by Jean Hetman could hardly be thought of as “having the police called repeatedly”
NY State law S240.26 Harassment in the second degree, states in part that if someone “follows a person in or about a public place or places” and “repeatedly commits acts which alarm or seriously annoy such other person and which serve no legitimate purpose” then they are guilty of harassment. In my opionion, Ms Hetman has done this and should be charged and brought into court for a legal decision. That’ my opinion.
You may have your opinion about Ms Hetman.
But my opinion is based on fact not on the very limited and one sided information that you have read in the newspaper article.
As I stated in my earlier comment “I do agree with you about the right to photograph in a public place” I don’t know how I can express that to you more clearly. I agree with you.
I believe, like you do, that photographer’s have a right to photograph in public places without permission of the municipal, State of Federal Govt.
I disagree with the comments you make suggesting that Jean Hetman has been harassed.
If I understand you right, we completely agree! My position is:
I used the word “suspect” about having the police called being harrasment because I don’t know (I hadn’t looked up the statute as you have).
For everyone else, here’s the whole thing:
If she’s doing this stuff, with or without a camera, I agree, she should be cited! (Or arrested, or whatever happens for a violation—I couldn’t find that at public.leginfo.state.ny.us).
You’re right, this has become an emotional issue of frustration for me. Not this situation in particular, but the problem in general. I find it hypocritical and stupid that photography is now a suspicious act when camera sales and usage are through the roof. Everyone and their brother seems to have a camera phone, which I see as a far greater threat to privacy than bigger or professional-looking equipment when I consider the comparative ease of taking a picture up a my wife’s skirt with a camera in a phone vs a big SLR. I’m really tired of the assumption that photographer equals terrorist, of people being lied to to get them to stop taking pictures in public, illegally chased away or detained, people having their cameras destroyed or photos confiscated, and of people being beaten, sometimes by police, for photographing legally. (For an alarming number of stories about this, check out PhotoPermit.org).
There is a third issue that we haven’t discussed, which is that according to the article in The Record, "The city maintains the new policy is to protect children from pedophiles", and I don’t even know where to begin on that one.
To me, the photography side of this is a very clear-cut, black-and-white issue. Public photography is not a crime. Period. Rogers says, “We are not going to let them be photographed or videotaped by anyone who comes along and wants to take their picture.” WRONG. You absolutely are, because that’s the law. The town using the tired “but think of the children!” line—which is generally the last resort of people who are out of anything even remotely reasonable-sounding to say and know it—doesn’t change that.
To continue to armchair quarterback, the police should deal with Hetman’s harassment, Rogers’ illegal policy, and the town’s seemingly disingenuous (harassment or pedophiles?) and illegal (neither is justification) defense of it.
If you feel that Hetman is distorting the situation, why not use your right to photograph and video in public to gather evidence against her for a harassment claim? If the police still refuse to do anything, why not go to the media with it yourself? (As a separate “there’s this woman harassing everyone and nobody’s doing anything about it despite this hard evidence” story rather than a “here’s why we were right to try to revoke people’s rights” rebuttal—as you said, they’re separate issues, and one isn’t a defense for the other.) This is exactly why the right to create visual records in public is so important!