Very Good Questions
First, 'auditing' is a whole new phenomenon created in response to folks reacting to being deprived of their rights.
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Rights auditors are individuals who are laying everything on the line (including their lives) in a struggle to educate bullies that it is totally legal (and your right) to walk on a sidewalk or any public place with a camera.
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Furthermore, it is your right to aim your camera in any direction and at anything the eye can see.
The eyes cannot be trespassed!
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As long as you are conducting yourself legally, no one has the right to even try to ID you (or to interfere with you) and furthermore it is improper for anyone to even ask you to identify yourself.
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Now you know what 'auditing' is and what 'auditors' are about. Predicated on an everlasting onslaught of oath breakers and bullying rights-thieves these specializing and dedicated 'auditing' auditors are numbering in the thousands and their numbers are growing.
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OUTCOME: A whole new attitude in court with fines against municipalities now ranging into an accumulating $Billions. When individual penalties against municipalities ranging up to and beyond $20 million there is a much sharper response to police brutality.
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WORSE: The sad loss of respect for police has put police lives in danger!
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Society needs good police officers, and we do have good police officers, who follow their oath to serve and protect. Unfortunately there are a few bad apples rotting the barrel!
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Open Season on Civil Rights
A still from a video by YouTube
personality Zhoie Perez, also known as "Furry Potato," which showedher being shot by a security guard outside a Los Angeles synagogue. (Furry
Potato/YouTube/PHOTOGRAPHER)
Feb. 15, 2019 at 5:32 p.m. EST
An armed security
guard shot a YouTube personality in the leg outside a Los Angeles synagogue on
Thursday as the confrontation was live-streamed to thousands of followers.
Zhoie Perez, who goes
by the name “Furry Potato” on YouTube, had been filming the guard as part
of what she calls a “First Amendment audit.” The second of two videos streamed
by Perez shows the guard standing behind a gate with his weapon drawn for about
four minutes, before he tells Perez to “get away” and fires his gun. Perez was
taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She told The Washington Post on Friday
that she was “shaken up, in pain” but okay.
“First Amendment
auditing” and its close cousin, “copwatching,” dates from at least the
mid-2000s and possibly much earlier (some filmers say they draw inspiration
from the civil rights era and early audits carried out with camcorders and VHS
tapes). Recently, the practice has morphed into a YouTube subculture, with
self-styled “auditors” in many major U.S. cities roaming into suburbs and small
towns to see how police react to a camera lens. The photographers consider
themselves to be testing their constitutional rights.
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In the practice’s
purest form, an auditor simply stands in a public space and films and refuses
to put the camera down, explain or identify herself or himself when an officer
approaches. Perez said she first came across the Los Angeles area community a couple
of years ago and felt compelled to create her own videos. “It’s not only about
shining a light on the crooked bad cops but shining an even brighter light on
the good cops,” she said. “You put yourself in places where you know chances
are the cops are going to be called. Are they going to uphold the constitution,
uphold the law … or break the law?”
On Thursday, Perez
filmed outside the Etz Jacob Congregation and Ohel Chana High School in the
historically Jewish Fairfax neighborhood of Los Angeles. Two videos were
broadcast live on the Furry Potato YouTube channel, though one
appears to have since been deleted. There are brief graphic moments in the
second live stream around the four-minute and 37-minute marks, as Perez appears
to have been shot and later films her injury from an ambulance.
Perez, who is 45 and
a transgender woman, told The Washington Post she initially began filming the
synagogue because she was intrigued by the architecture as she walked back from
a doctor’s appointment at nearby Cedars-Sinai hospital. “I saw the synagogue,
and I said I’m going to go check it out. It’s got a lot of neat stuff on it,
like the stained glass windows,” she said. It did not turn into an audit-like
situation until the security guard confronted her, she said.
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“It turned into an
impromptu First Amendment audit because the security guard almost immediately
was getting really aggressive with the filming and putting the hand on the
gun,” Perez said. At the time, she said, she did not realize the building also
housed a school.
Perez also said she
was not aware of last year’s Pittsburgh synagogue
shooting, in which 11 worshipers were killed by a gunman with
anti-Semitic views during Saturday morning services. The massacre put the
country’s Jewish community on edge. Many Jewish institutions such as schools
and synagogues have some form of security in the event of a threat, and some
increased security after the Pittsburgh violence.
The Los Angeles
Police Department said in a brief release that officers responded to a call on
Thursday to a disturbance that was later upgraded to a “shooting just
occurred.” At the scene, officers found a person with a gunshot wound to the
leg and transported the person to the hospital. The statement said the security
guard was armed and later detained.
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Norma Eisenman, a Los
Angeles police officer, confirmed to The Post that the guard, Edduin
Zelayagrunfeld, 44, had been arrested. She said Perez had not been charged.
The second
live-streamed video shows the shooting and some of the events that led to it.
It begins with the
synagogue’s security guard standing behind a gate, holding his gun. Perez
repeatedly zooms in on the gun as commenters react in real time to the
confrontation with messages ranging from “Be careful, girl!” to “Those Jews are
crazy!”
“He told me he’s
going to shoot me dead,” Perez narrates about two minutes into the stream. “He
said if I move he’s going to shoot me dead."
“Why are you
recording us?” Zelayagrunfeld asks, still holding the gun. “Why are you
recording me? Why are you recording this institution?” Perez does not answer
the guard but tells her live-stream viewers once again, “He’s said he’s going
to shoot me if I move.”
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Four minutes in, he
does.
The video appears to
show Zelayagrunfeld pointing his gun low, possibly at the ground. There’s a
bang, and a second later Perez shouts as the camera swings to the sidewalk. As
Perez shouts in agony, “The [expletive] shot me!” Zelayagrunfeld can be heard
yelling “get away” before coming out of the gate to berate Perez, saying he had
fired a “warning shot."
Bystanders appear to
help Perez, while Zelayagrunfeld momentarily follows and insists that he “shot
at the floor.” About 12 minutes in, police officers arrive to assist Perez but,
according to Perez’s narration, also appear to detain her. “I get shot and I’m
going in handcuffs?” Perez asks. “Everything’s live-streamed; 100 percent of
it’s live-streamed,” she tells the officers, and declines to provide her name.
The camera’s lens is obscured or pointed low to the ground for most of the
encounter with police.
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In the final moments
of the nearly 40-minute stream, Perez, in an ambulance, turns the camera on her
wounded leg. She tells her viewers she’s heading to the hospital. She later
told KCAL 9 News that “the doctor said it was a graze.”
“This is not only an
example of the paranoia in this country among cops and security guards when it
comes to citizens with cameras but an example of the dangers of placing armed
security guards and cops in schools,” said Carlos Miller, whose website Photography
Is Not a Crime employs and writes about auditors. “[Like] many
other cops and security guards, this guard lacked basic de-escalation skills,
choosing to escalate a nonviolent and lawful interaction with a citizen by
firing a deadly weapon. "
In 2018, Perez created a
GoFundMe campaign to raise money for her auditing and her transition. It raised
$3,575. Later that year, she was arrested for filming outside a Marine Corps recruitment
facility, later pleading no contest to one infraction count of
disturbing the peace and paid a $100 fine. On Tuesday, Perez streamed a “cop
watch” video on YouTube in which she and a friend film and speak to officers in
Los Angeles. In the video, Perez narrates that she and the friend were on their
way to conduct a separate “audit” when they saw several police cars parked on
the street. Perez tells viewers that she and the friend were “making sure that
they’re not hurting anybody; that’s it.” At one point, Perez’s friend chats
with an officer about the make and model of the cars.
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“We’re not auditing
this place,” she clarifies in the video.
It’s the so-called
failed audits that tend to get the most clicks, which has led to accusations
from police that aggressive auditors are intentionally provoking them.
In May, an auditor
known as “Mexican Padilla” was arrested
while filming (and shouting and cursing) inside a police station in
Leon Valley, Tex. This inspired a days-long protest in the town by auditors
from across the country — during which police detained, arrested and
confiscated cameras from several other YouTube personalities, leading to yet
more viral videos and yet more outrage.
Nearly a dozen
protesters and auditors are now suing Leon Valley in federal court,
alleging that police assaulted, harassed, intimidated and illegally detained
them.
In 2017, a federal
appeals court ruled in favor of Phillip Turner,
an auditor who sued three Fort Worth police officers after he was detained
while filming on a sidewalk near a police station. “Filming the police
contributes to the public’s ability to hold the police accountable, ensure that
police officers are not abusing their power, and make informed decisions about
police policy,” wrote Justice Jacques Wiener of the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the 5th Circuit.
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