[Imc-g8-2005] g8 video/anti-repression strategies

[yossarian]

Hi,

There was a great video segment the other day on Democracy Now! in the
US, regarding the use of Indymedia video evidence to counter doctored
police tapes used as evidence in court against demonstrators at the
Republican National Convention last summer.  I am wondering if we could
do some prep work before the G8 to help ourselves later.

A few ideas:

a) There should be a central archive of videotape available not just to
filmmakers but also on call for legal reasons if necessary.  Defense
lawyers should know about the existence of this archive so they can use
it if necessary.

b)  Indymedia reporters on the street, especially videographers, are
facing more problems - a couple of weeks ago one person from IMC-London
was arrested for *filming an arrest*.  I think we can expect to see this
kind of thing emerge as a police strategy, because we are a threat to
their exercise of power on the street.  Would it be possible to
coordinate a counter-strategy between legal people and video people? 

We could hand out a leaflet to all video people we can get near, saying
that there will be something like a class action suit (I dunno if they
have these in the UK) or just some big court / media circus (with
lawsuits for false arrest), if the police attempt to mess with people on
the streets for filming.  This might be a very credible deterrent to
police harassment if we had solid contact with lawyers and civil
liberties organizations prior to the summit, and maybe a card that we
could hand out to non-corporate journalists (especially videographers)
saying that they are participating in the XXINSERT SNAZZY NAME HEREXX
initiative against police harrassment of independent media.

The url for the Democracy Now! story is:
[text]: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/14/1349256
[video]:
http://play.rbn.com/?url=demnow/demnow/demand/2005/april/video/dnB20050414a.rm&proto=rtsp&start=09:56
[audio]: http://www.archive.org/download/dn2005-0414/dn2005-0414-1_64kb.mp3

Maybe if anyone is interested in this it could be mostly coordinated on
the imc-g8-2005 list?  The legal list is closed, this probably is better
if as many people as possible know about it...

Just a thought,
Yossarian