Live Free Or Die?
Sad news out of the only state that seems to still value small government and individual liberties. According to a story in the Nashua Telegraph, a man has been charged with two felonies after videotaping a police officer who was on their doorstep. The officer was there investigating the man’s sons.
Apparently, the Gannon’s (the family in question) own a 4-unit building and had installed a video/audio recording system to monitor the front door and parking areas about two years prior. They bought the equipment in response to two break-ins, including a physical attack on Mr. Gannon. The problem came when a detective showed up at their door at 11:30pm on a Friday and 7:00pm n Tuesday. The detective was investigating Gannon’s 15-year-old son on a robbery charge (a mugging), handgun possession and resisting detention. The detective, accompanied by several other police officers, wouldn’t leave when asked and blocked the Gannon’s from closing the door with his foot. Mr. Gannon made a comment about smiling for the camera and then took the tape of the incident to the police station, asking to speak to someone in “public relations”. That was when he was charged with two felony counts of “violating state eavesdropping and wiretap law by using an electronic device to record [detective] Karlins without the detective’s consent.”
Now, reading the article, it strikes me that both sides are at fault here. The Gannon’s certainly do not come across as innocent victims in all of this, given that their son is apparently quite the delinquent and that they seem quite hostile to the police, but the police don’t seem to be helping matters by acting like tyrants and abusing laws to intimidate and threaten citizens who may have caught their officers behaving badly. What saddens me is that New Hampshire is supposed to be one of the last bastions of true, State-supported freedom left in this country and now we have a story where the police are charging a man with heavy-duty crimes simply because he was trying to protect himself from being intimidated, robbed or attacked (by thugs or the police).
So I’m not going to go quite so far as to say that the police are wholly in the wrong here (I have a sneaking suspicion that the Gannon’s are seriously hampering any investigations of their son, and they seem to be anti-police regardless), instead I’m going to say that both parties are acting like cranky crybabies. The problem is, the police are abusing their authority during the course of their tantrum, and that means that they need a longer time-out than the Gannons.
