Arrest
on May 1st: «Illegal Portrayal of Policemen»
«Anger», journalist
/ cameraman / photographer and collaborator for PigBrother.info
gets violently arrested by 5 masked undercover officers in front
of culture center Kanzlei / Zurich at 16.00. Camera and videotape
get confiscated. They are going to take him to court.
Anger is in the local policecorps only too well known for his
work depicting e.g. the puking officer having inhaled some of
his own «teargas» - see pics / loops here and on other pages.
Anger was filming police action on the Helvetia square in front
of the restaurant Volkshaus at 16.00. When he watched a masked undercover
officer provocatively posing with an empty beer bottle in his hand
in the middle of the street, he demanded from him to put the bottle
down, what he actually did after a while faceing the running camera.
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Mobile
«teargas»-spray-cannons linked with death of a demonstrator,
dying the next day coughing blood
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But
after leaving the spot and crossing the main street, Anger has to
pay the price: About 5 undercover officers jump on him from behind
without advance warning, throw him to the ground, quite literally
buried by police officers. For better fixation one officer puts his
boot on the head pressing his face into the concrete (light abrasion
and contusion on cheek). His glasses brake, the camera gets
confiscated, he gets arrested. First the accusation is "Taking
illegal portrait pictures" the favourite excuse
for harrassing members of the press during the last 20 years,
confiscating and «accidentally destroying» films
and tapes and gravely beating unliked photographers, although
there actually doesn't exist such a law which prohibits taking
pictures of policemen.
Unfortunately for the police, after years and years of legal struggle,
concluding in a case won before federal court by media-union comedia,
just this spring 2002 the policechief had finally to admit this fact.
So, after a first look through Angers material, this accusation was
silently dumped, the new accusation being "hindering officers
from official duty" - a tried and tested "offence of
embarrassment": Whenever police can't blame the arrested for
nothing, but despite won't let him free, a (false) statement of an
officer (or two) is sufficient to zurich courts for conviction.
Thanks to the immediate intervention of an emergency lawyer, the camera
is sealed on the police station (Pictures of police violence get
regularly erased and films exposed "by mistake" by police
in zurich).
Meanwhile, District Attorney Urbatus doesn't care to seize the
videotape properly according to the law, let alone to give the
illegaly confiscated videotape back but instead hands
it out to the Political Police !!!
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