Santa Claus, also known by his friends as James Peterson, was arrested after spreading holiday cheer and chalk with young people in front of the Texas capitol building on the 21st. An occupy activist who was giving out chalk to children while dressed as Santa was well received in the plaza, but as he left, Texas DPS officers chased him down and handcuffed him. The crowd appears shocked, one woman yelling out in confusion, “You’re arresting Santa Claus?!”
The jolly red man asks numerous times, “Why am I being arrested?” After a minute, they tell him that he was chalking the sidewalk. A few in the crowd having filmed the entire time tell police that everyone was chalking, to which a female officer states, “You’re the only report that we got of chalking.” (more…)
The Ridley Report has recently been publishing continued analysis of the court victory for the independent journalist following his arrest in May of 2011. Three months later, Ridley was acquitted at a bench trial of a misdemeanor charge of trespassing, and a detailed summary of the trial was posted to Free Concord the following day.
A playlist on the Ridley Report youtube channel documents all of his own coverage beginning with the arrest and protests shortly thereafter, and continuing with analyzed video from the trial of key moments. On December 1 of this year, a video published which described a possible continuation of the case into legal land, this time in the form of a civil lawsuit against the Nashua police. Illustrated with claymation produced by another youtube content creator, the video entitled, Nashua police reject demand for groper’s dismissal linked to this information posted to a public forum by Ridley.
As you may recall, Nashua police arrested me while I was trying to film their actions outside a hotel in which Joe Biden was speaking. In the process of searching me, the arresting officer Denis Linehan touched my genitals. After our defeat of trespassing charges in court, my lawyer Stephen Martin has helped me issue a pair of demands. If met, we would drop suit. The initial demand called for monetary damages in the $15,000 range. When the city rejected that we represented that firing Linehan would be enough to prevent the suit. As expected, city attorney Brian Cullen has rejected that offer too. The city has however indicated a willingness to accept some other non-monetary settlement.
Throughout this month, four additional videos of highlights from the criminal trial have been uploaded. You can see even more edited portions of the trial created in 2011 on the playlist. (more…)
This post was originally published to KeeneCopBlock.org on Dec. 19th, 2012.
Many folks who reside in Keene are aware of the petty harassment doled out by Fred Parsells.
A former Keene police employee, Parsells now claims a “legitimate” right to be a nosy bother to his neighbors due to his occupation as a code enforcer.
Fortunately a lot of thinking individuals have concluded that when the initiation of force or its threat is utilized, whether “officially” sanctioned or not, the person initiating is in the wrong.
There’s much I love about Keene. Yet I could do without the countless iterations of force threatened or initiated by Fred Parsells.
One may have noticed that a good amount of the content featured here in the past week has followed a bicycle headlamp trial endeavor of this blog’s editor, Garret Ean. The full trial video with very minimal editing has finished uploading and is now available via youtube.com/freeconcordtv. About 2/3 of the video’s fifty-four minute run time consists of the cross examination of detaining officer Michael Pearl. The raw videos from which the complete piece was crafted have been available since shortly after the event at Fr33manTVraw. There has been an entry featuring new media from the trial almost every day since, including coverage of the camera fiasco prior to the trial, a raw podcast segment overviewing the trial, and a visually illustrated discussion of court issues from Tuesday evening’s episode of Free Talk Live.
Dave Ridley yesterday uploaded one of his most intriguing camera-ban videos. Aaron Snipe, spokesman for the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, on October 9 delivered a speech at the UNH Manchester campus. Snipe is a graduate of Emerson College in Boston and it appears has been going on speaking tours for the federal government for the past few years. Early in the video, we see a poster advertising the event entitled, “US Policy in the Middle East”. At the bottom is printed, “Free and Open to the Public”. Despite this, Ridley is told by an event organizer that he would not be allowed to audio or video record the event, but that he was free to attend and take notes.
The video ends with an ambush interview of Snipe as he walks from the hallway into the venue. Snipe enters with another man in a suit and carrying a satchel, allowing him to keep his hands free. When Ridley asks why recording is banned from the evening’s engagement, Snipe appears confused, and his presumed assistant replies, “Why is he off-the-record? It’s just because that’s the ground rules we set, thank you.” (more…)
Published today is a half hour of discussion from Tuesday night’s episode of Free Talk Live covering the happenings around the recent bicycle headlamp/audio recording trial. Included are video from incidents cited during the radio show, featuring the coerced removal of a videographer from the lobby of the Concord District Court. See the full trial video at the FreeConcordTV youtube channel.
