Good Points by Bishakha.. We need to be prepared and organised if anything
happens again..
Deepon
On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 11:25 PM, Bishakha Datta <bishakhadatta(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 4:25 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan <
parakara.ghoda(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I agree with you completely. While I've never
been dragged to a Police
station, the Coimbatore Police made me delete ALL my photos on the camera,
and the Bangalore Police took away my memory card.
This is really a shame. Did they specify under what law they were doing
this?
Since these situations are cropping up on photo walks, here are some
ground-level suggestions for individual volunteers or groups embarking on
these:
1)Familiarize yourself with 'photo restrictions' in your city/state: These
may differ, and none of us know all the restrictions in each state - maybe
a news photographer or someone could be asked in advance, since we seem to
have good media contacts in India in general? (Tinu or anyone else: do you
think there is someone who could help provide this info? We are all
ignorant here. Individuals would feel more confident if they knew whether
or not what they are doing is illegal.)
2)Stand your ground to the extent possible: Keep asking which law is being
applied if any police action - charging with a case, arrest, confiscation -
is brought up. I know this is very very hard to do when faced with police
personnel, but still. The police are less likely to bully someone who can
firmly ask questions - and who does not get intimidated by the law.
3)Create a chain of 'help': Call another wikipedian for help - if there
are 2-3 or more wikipedians present, divide up tasks, so that one-two
people can engage the cops while another makes phone calls. When Pranav
called me, I in turn called lawyer friends who clarified that P&Co were not
breaking the law. I then felt more confident to ask them to 'stand their
ground'.
4)Cultivate contacts with media, including photographers, who may have
this information or lawyers in your city who can help with this information
(including legal students).
This is not meant to imply that no larger help is needed - it's not an
either/or, and institutional support may be needed in some cases. These are
just small suggestions to empower individual on the spot.
Best
Bishakha
_______________________________________________
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l