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.

Mobile «teargas»-spray-cannons linked with death of a demonstrator, dying the next day coughing blood

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 !!!




No.  6'666'666'667


P i g B r o t h e r   e n g l i s h  H o m e


File 1: "TEARGAS"

File 2: "RUBBER BULLETS"