Portions of the surveillance video at the Twin Peaks biker shootout have been released despite a court imposed gag order. You won’t see the video here, nor will I comment about specific events or persons portrayed in the video. The MSM will have you believe that there is a Constitutional balancing act going on here. I think when the press uses what is essentially stolen information to undermine the rights of the accused they have pretty much lost the high ground.
On the one hand we have the First Amendment that gives the press the right to publish what they want when they want without fear of governmental interference. This allows the public to be kept informed regarding important events in their community.
On the other hand we have the rights of the accused as the set out in the First Amendment the right to freely associate with persons, the Fourth Amendment the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, the Fifth Amendment, the right to remain silent and not be compelled to testify against oneself and the Sixth Amendment the right to a trial by jury, represented by an attorney. We have given judges the authority to determine how much leeway the prosecution and defense has in discussing issues before a particular court.
This battle is as old as the Republic itself. The dimension that disturbs me is the advent of video surveillance. If you are in a public place and are captured on a legitimately installed video surveillance system, then you have no “reasonable expectation of privacy”. It is likely that that embarrassing video of an individual picking his nose or his seat was observed by any number of people. Most of the time nobody cares. The fact that the actor didn’t see these witnesses is immaterial. The introduction of a system that catches these moments and records them for posterity is not the chimera here. The issue is, is such a vignette presented the proper in context? It may be that when all the information related to the video, angel, distance, multiple views with supporting testimony would lead a “trier of fact” to one conclusion verses an entirely different and contradictory conclusion when presented with limited information. When an illegitimately obtained copy goes out the back door of the police station, courthouse or defense attorney’s office the potential jury is unlike to get the benefit of all the information available.
There is a tendency to believe that videos don’t lie, they do. If it wasn’t for lying videos there would be no reason to go to the movies. Ask somebody who knows San Francisco to duplicate the Bullit chase sequence. It can’t be done, many of the stretches of road do not connect. Recall the closing moments of Casablanca, Ilsa believes that she and Rick are going to board the plane for Lisbon, leaving Victor Laslow behind. Rick has other plans and gives Laslow and Ilsa the letters of transit, their ticket out of Casablanca. In the background the ground crew works on the airplane, oblivious to the drama going on before them. The scene was filmed on a soundstage. The airplane was a scale model. In order to maintain the correct scale between the the ground crew and airplane, the director used midgets as the ground crew. Sorry if I ruined the ending for you. I know this and I don’t care, it is still one of the most effective scenes ever to come out of Hollywood.
I predict that this rush to equip police officers with video cameras will not achieve the goals intended by proponents. I believe they already know this and will use every technology failure, every occasion where the camera is pointed the wrong way, every instance where the camera is blinded due to light or lack of light to bolster their claim of conspiracy and malfeasance. Alternately, they will just shout louder and pretend the video doesn’t exist.
The surveillance camera has a value when the footage captured is independently supported by testimony. Those defendants captured on the Twin Peaks video will not have that opportunity because the video has been released piecemeal. If you have seen the video, so what. What are you going to do now? Is the video compelling enough to cause the peasantry to rise up with pitchforks and torches and storm the castle, like a bad Frankenstein movie? Not likely, the take away will be the commercial following the Waco video will have alerted you to a special at the local grocery store. When all’s said and done a journalist and the medium they work in is nothing more than a huckster for toilet paper and tampons.