During yesterday’s appalling incident in Virginia, one police officer attending the scene of Vester Flanagan’s detainment ordered a BBC reporter to delete footage he had taken or have their car and camera confiscated.
Franz Strasser who is employed by BBC News US alleged that a single police officer gave him the ultimatum while they were covering the story. Unusually as he points out in his Tweets the choice he was given was to delete the evidence or have it confiscated.
Strasser shared the experience via his Twitter account.
In a bizarre twist the police officer seemed bias towards Strasser’s footage and not his colleague’s who recorded the confrontation on her phone.
As he quite rightly points out, the police officer is falling foul to his own made up rules.
Unfortunately none of the footage recovered from either device had imagery of the police officer who made the threat, only voices were heard. However what the remaining tweets show from Strasser is just how unusable the footage was which begs the question – why did this officer want the “evidence” deleted?
Strasser has all but concluded the episode with a statement from Corinne Geller of Virginia State Police.
In other communications he stresses that this is a conversation best had for another day as there are more important things to be considering. Quite right. We are however interested to see how this plays out and what, if any charges are pressed against the alleged state officer.
via Poynter.org
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