I’ve been traveling and I’m late to this party, but I wanted to post about Emily Good. She’s a DFH in Rochester, someone who occasionally gets arrested during protests. A few weeks ago, she used her iPod to videotape a police stop in front of her house and was arrested by a cop after she failed to comply with his order to return to her house. That’s upsetting, since it’s perfectly legal for a citizen to videotape police, especially when they’re not interfering (and the video shows that Good wasn’t). Charges against Good were, predictably, dismissed on Monday. But, in my view, that’s not what’s disturbing about this case — it’s the lying and intimidation by the local cops that’s much worse.
After the video went public, Good was called “biased against police” by the police union president. When her supporters had a meeting, a group of police officers showed up with rulers to ticket any car that was parked farther than 12 inches from the curb. And Good’s home was burgled under suspicious circumstances.
Though the video shows one black male being handcuffed by cops, the police are claiming that the stop involved three members of an inner-city gang.
I think Good is a harmless hippie, but even if she is an enemy of the police, as the union rep charges, there’s no way she could have done a fraction of the damage that the cops inflicted on themselves in her case. They’ve shown themselves to be liars who will spin gang members from whole cloth who will use Mickey Mouse charges to intimidate innocent civilians. I’m not a lawyer, but if I were on a jury, I’d be very goddam skeptical about anything written in a police report in my fair city, or any evidence offered by a police officer that wasn’t corroborated by independent witnesses.