ASYLUM

* Finally!

I've been waiting months for the judicial process to get to this stage: Examining video evidence to determine which of the conflicting accounts of the Republican National Convention is true.

For instance:

We picked [Kyne] up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed [...] I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own. — Officer M Wohl, testifying under oath

All charges in this case were dropped. Why?

A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints. — New York Times

In a way, I've been waiting even longer. There have always been conflicting accounts when police and protestors clash, and I've never known who to believe. I've only been on one protest — the original "Not In Our Name" anti-Iraq-War march — and despite over a million people turning up, both the crowd and the police presence seemed relaxed and cheerful at best and bored at worst — certainly there was no violence.

In some instances, we know protestors have caused trouble (eg seattle WTO riots). In others, we know police have doctored evidence (due to the extreme incompetence of the officer(s) responsible who decided a good way to wipe a tape was to record over it with the lens-cap on, apparently forgetting the built-in microphone which caught their discussion in the police station). But on the whole we have, in the past, had little to go on.

But video cameras are cheap these days. My digital still camera actually takes pretty good video footage. Hell, get a fancy-enough service plan and a mopho network will give you, free, a phone capable of recording video. More and more people carry video devices routinely, can certainly rustle something up if they're going to a special event, and many of them are compact enough not to draw extra attention. And access to a distribution network for the resulting footage is now eminently feasable through BitTorrent or whatever.

Much is made of the surveillance-state tendencies of video technology; and certainly I've witnessed police pointing video cameras at (as far as I could tell, harmless) protestors in Green Park as I wandered past one lunchtime, but it's important not to forget that this technology is content-neutral, and can be used for the people as well:

For Mr. Kyne and 400 others arrested that week, video recordings provided evidence that they had not committed a crime or that the charges against them could not be proved, according to defense lawyers and prosecutors

There is one question unanswered, however — why isn't Officer Wohl being prosecuted for perjury? Or, in a wider sense, the police force in general being upbraided for wrongful arrest? Check out their hit-rate:

Of the 1,670 cases that have run their full course, 91 percent ended with the charges dismissed or with a verdict of not guilty after trial.

* Announcement

Descending into Victoria Underground Station yesterday evening, we caught only the tail end of an announcement over the tannoy; it consisted of:

And furthermore, I'd just like to say this... "This".