Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

I have a number of friends who are cops, good friends and even family members. I respect the police mostly. I respect how hard their job is and that they sacrifice a great deal to serve and protect the public. But there are always bad apples out there and I was extremely disappointed to read comments in a police officer internet forum today on the Oscar Grant shooting.

Here are some choice posts:

“Any number of reasons that he may have shot…..you can see from the video that there is a struggle before the shot is fired (even before the officer pulls his weapon)…..the suspect may have reached underneath him, leading the shooter to believe that he was attempting to retrieve a weapon….. There isnt enough info to call it a bad shoot…….not by a long shot….. btw….saying ‘liberal media’ is redundant…….esp. in SF area…….” by Forum Member LA DEP who says he’s an officer for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.

Forum member Brenden then adds:

“I don’t know why people worry themselves with such things. The people that get shot are the people who put lives at risk. That cop probably saved the taxpayers over 200K in Courtfee’s and other convictions anyways. Maybe he even saved someone from getting killed.”

jb5722, who describes himself as a sworn police officer from North Carolina writes: “I would say that I’m sure the officer had his reasons for firing his weapon,” after adding earlier that if a reporter’s mouth is open they are lying.

Tex4720, who describes himself as 23 year veteran patrol sergeant from Texas, speculates that: “the guy may have repeatedly told the officers he was going to shoot them and then reached under his body. Or a million different things that would prove in the end that this was a righteous shoot.”

One member, scratched 13, who describes himself as a police officer from the South goes so far as to suggest that the video of the incident may have been faked.

People wonder why some people hate the police. They wonder why people don’t respect the police. They wonder why protesters around the Bay Area have been protesting with chants of “F*** the police,” for the past week. All I can say is that asinine cops making comments like the ones above in a public forum are as big a part of the problem as anything. How a cop behaves in online forums and the words they choose can be amplified and magnified.

As much as many of these comments made by cops are offensive, just the overall tone of a forum like this troubles me. Referring to shootings as “righteous,” claiming that taxpayers are saved court fees when someone is killed, even the signatures that many of these cops choose to use as their taglines (Fear not the night. Fear that which walks the night. And *I* am that which walks the night.) just goes to show me that much of the hatred towards the police is due at least in part to the attitudes that comes from the cops themselves.

You can read more comments in this thread but the overall tone is that the news media and reporters (especially in the Bay Area) suck and mostly people trying to somehow defend the actions of Johannes Mehserle, the cop who shot Oscar Grant (and the cop who was arrested for the murder of Oscar Grant yesterday).

Interesting to read what this shooting looks like from a police perspective.

By the way, this same police forum has been discussing my recent stop by the Long Beach Harbor Patrol while shooting last month here. It’s unfortunate for me to read comments like this one: “Point is, if they ask you to move, then move. Why do people have to be so annoying about minor stuff. I am sure there are tons of other things you can take pictures of. If they say it’s against the law, then say ok and move along.”

Update: It seems that forums.officer.com has now deleted in it’s entirety the post about my recent run in with the Long Beach Harbor Patrol. Why does it not surprise me that a site like this one would so easily censor the threads in their forums?

About 100 demonstrators protested in the streets of San Francisco last night in San Francisco’s first major Oscar Grant protest. Oscar Grant was the 22-year old man who was killed and shot in the back by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle early New Year’s day at the Fruitvale BART station with the shooting heavily seen afterwards in videos around the internet.

The protest was mostly peaceful in contrast to last week’s more violent protest that took place in Oakland.

The protesters began protesting at around 5:45pm at the Civic Center BART station and then marched from there down to the Powell Street BART station and then downtown around near the Sutter and Montgomery intersection. About 50 or so San Francisco Police Officers monitored the protest and accompanied the march down Market Street. The local news crews were out as well with cameras and microphones in the protest.

Except for a very small amount of graffiti that I saw spray painted downtown and a reported trash can fire, there were no other incidents of violence accompanying this protest. The speakers at the protest kept encouraging violence in their speeches though telling people that they needed to “tear s*** up,” but the crowd seemed to lack the momentum that turned Oakland violent last week. No one was arrested in this protest.

The protest was promoted earlier in the day on Indy Bay with the tagline, “The kids in Oakland know how to party. Let’s show them they are not alone.”

The protest did not seem very well organized and except for a small battery powered bull horn which kept losing power, there did not seem to be anyone really in charge.

A few of the comic moments for me came as the protesters passed the bull horn around to each other sort of randomly. In one case I think one of the guys who got a turn on the bullhorn wasn’t even part of the original protest. Before the protest had even started he seemed to be just hanging around Civic Center telling anyone who would listen about problems with his wife. When he got the bull horn I’m not even sure he knew what the protest was about, but he did get an opportunity to rant a bit about his wife.

Another comic moment for me came when the protesters seemed to get into some sort of an argument with each other over the fact that some of the protesters were wearing bandanas over their face to mask their faces. One of the protesters challenged the protesters wearing bandanas to remove them from their faces while a protester with a bandana on tried to explain why she had hers on handing out a leaflet explaining it.

It seemed early on that some of the protesters were trying to make the protest about other things complaining about Palestinian occupation and homelessness in San Francisco. At one point a protester shouted into the bull horn. “How many of you are homeless and living in Golden Gate Park?” No one raised their hand and so he said, “ok, well a lot of people are,” and went on with his speech.

A few of the protesters said that they knew Oscar Grant. Another gave a speech saying that his best friend had been killed by the cops. Mostly though they just shouted and chanted “f*** the police,” “we are all Oscar Grant,” and “no justice, no peace.”

The protest seemed to gain the most momentum down around Market and Sansome Street when the protesters took a turn into downtown and the police on motorcycles couldn’t easily follow them down a one-way street. The protesters then headed up Bush Street where the SFPD sort of cut the protesters in half completely blocking off the intersection of Sutter and Montgomery in riot gear for about 15 minutes. After that the protest just seemed to dissolve into thin air. A few folks headed back up Market Street but mostly people just went on their way.

I put together a set of 50 photos from last night’s protest that you can see here.

Laura Brunow Miner, JPG Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief sent the following email out this morning updating people on what’s going on with JPG Magazine:

We couldn’t ask for a better community. In the week or so since our last email, the outpour of support has exceeded our wildest expectations. Your efforts, such as starting savejpg.com, writing blog posts, commenting on Twitter and Flickr, and generally making your voices heard, have provided exciting new opportunities for us.

We’re thrilled to say that because of you, we have multiple credible buyers interested in giving JPG a home. We will be keeping the site up after all, and hope to have a final update in the next week or so on who the acquirer will be. Thank you for making all of this possible.

Laura Brunow Miner
Editor in Chief

Not sure who the possible buyer might be, but several names have been brought up recently. One possible suitor mentioned in the past has been Flickr, but I highly doubt this would happen. According to Heather Champ, who works at Flickr and is also a co-founder of JPG Magazine, Flickr “are not and never have been interested in bidding on JPG.”

The photo above marks my 20,000th upload to Flickr. My first photo uploaded to Flickr was uploaded on January 2, 2005, four years ago. Over the past four years, sharing photos online has redefined how I view my own work. I have found inspiration from other photographers daily and I’ve met some truly, truly amazing artists, photographers and people participating in this new world of social photography along the way.

Thanks to everyone who over the last four years has stopped by my photos and left a note, a comment, a fave — touch from one human being to another. Your testimonials, your emails, your blog comments, spending a few hours walking around San Francisco or Oakland or Berkeley or Hollywood or Sacramento or Las Vegas or Portland or Seattle or New York or New Orleans or anyplace else our paths have crossed, in real life or online have held great meaning for me. I’ve appreciated the feedback, I’ve appreciated the friendship, I’ve appreciated the support. It’s made me a better photographer. It’s made me a better person.

20,000 uploads to Flickr represents 2% of a goal that I’ve come to define as part of this process of learning about myself and my photography.

I’d like to publish one million photographs online before I die.

This means that I’m planning on shooting, processing, and publishing photographs every single day for the rest of my life. It means that I have to live a long time and be careful to maintain a pace that makes this likely based on human life expectancy. It means living my life with a camera constantly by my side. Permanently attached to my being. Framing my world hour by hour as I move about this planet. Every day a new opportunity to find and present new beauty to the entire connected world.

I’m optimistic about what the future holds. A phrase I’ve repeated often is that the best photographs in the world have yet to be taken. This phrase isn’t meant to discount the amazing work of so many great photographers of yesteryear that have paved the way for the world of photography today. Rather, it’s meant in a spirit of hope. Hope that tomorrow will bring still more opportunities to capture the human condition and the beauty around us. Hope in an evolutionary creative vision that lives in all of us and that is constantly finding new ways to express things artistically. Hope and a belief that in technological advances are born even greater ways to help us achieve our artistic passions.

And on the continuing ride that the next 40 years or so may have in store for me, I’m excited about how much of my life will overlap with the people that I continue to have the good fortune to run across in this world. As much as my photography allows me to constantly interact with people in the offline world, friends and strangers alike, as big a part of that overlap, at least for me, comes from this great big world of online photo sharing that we all share with such generosity.

Photographers criminalised as police 'abuse' anti-terror laws – Home News, UK – The Independent:

"'The car skidded to a halt like something out of Starsky & Hutch and this officer jumped out very dramatically and said 'what are you doing?' I told him I was photographing the building and he said he was going to search me under the Anti-Terrorism Act,' he recalled.

For Powell, this brush with the law resulted in five hours in a cell after police seized the lock-blade knife he uses to sharpen his pencils. His release only came after the intervention of the local MP, Simon Hughes, but not before he was handcuffed and his genetic material stored permanently on the DNA database."

More madness from the Photo Police. Photography is not a crime.

Thanks, Gary!

I was disappointed last night to spend over two hours, including three customer service calls (holding up to 20 minutes in one case), in order to try and get Netflix’s “Watch Now” service to work on my XBox 360.

On the first customer service call the rep suggested that my internet connection wasn’t fast enough. But with a UVerse fiber connection (and a speed test to verify) this was not the problem. On the second customer service call, the rep had me uninstall my XBox 360 memory files on my XBox 360 and reinstall them.

After about an hour and a half of trying to troubleshoot why my programming would just stop, I went to Twitter and searched for Netflix and found that there were several other people Twittering about having problems with “Watch Now” last night as well.

When I called Netflix the third time they confirmed that they were having problems with their watch now servers last night.

Overall I’ve been pretty happy with the Netflix Watch Now service so far. Fast forwarding and rewinding are a bit of a chore, but other than that, once you’re watching your show it’s seemed to work pretty well.

Having their service go out for much of last night (and a Saturday night at that) is a huge fail though. If Netflix wants people to seriously consider their service as an alternative to cable/satellite (and the market for Netflix is huge if you think about them that way), then they need to do a better job both with their main streaming service as well as their customer service when their service fails. Particularly being 20 minutes into a TV show and at a very tense point of the show, to have Netflix hang for two hours and fail (finally giving up in frustration) doesn’t score any points with trying to convince the wife on why this service is better than cable/satellite service.

Hopefully last night’s experience won’t be a repeated one for Netflix and hopefully it’s not just the tip of the iceberg in terms of their problems in meeting viewer demand for streaming content.

fem.men.ist: Reportback From The Oscar Grant Protests/Riots.

I’ve been pretty carefully following various news reports and blog reports following the Oakland protest and riots this week. I thought this post by Richard at fem.men.ist was a particularly well written heartfelt first hand report of the scene on Wednesday night.

“So yeah, at this point I think i’m about ready to head back home now. I see friends Bea and Inez, and tell them that I have seen enough for tonight, and that i’m going home. A young sista overhears me, and says with a half joking voice “you should give me your candle then.” I turn and look at her.
“Do you really want my candle?” I can see that she has been crying all night.
“Yeah.”
“Blessings.” I reach out and give it to her, and she looks into my eyes and smiles in a way that warmed my whole soul.”