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In my last post I said Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust would soon upload video of retired and off-duty rent-a-cops posing as on-duty cops at the Jimmy Kimmel stunt shoot, when cameramen turned their spotlights on a teen pro-life protester.
Following are a couple.
In this 1st video Troy Newman of Operation Rescue realizes the pretense and calls the posers on it. They sheepishly do not deny Newman's claim....
In this next video Jeff White, founder of the Survivors, asks one of the film crew cops point blank several times, "Are you LAPD?" He attempts to deflect White's questioning before wilting away as the same younger rent-a-cop as in the 1st video steps in. Incidentally, White's shirt has been torn by cameramen who refused to turn their spotlights away from young Ryan Bueler and fought White off when he then tried to...
Apparently there is on-going controversy whether retired and off-duty LAPD officers who have been hired for security by the film industry should be allowed to wear their uniforms. (Read here and here.)
On 1 side is the film industry that says, 1) the public won't respect film crew cops who wear security guard garb; and 2) they'll have to pay more for on-duty cops in LAPD uniform.
On the other side is the LAPD, which, quoting the Los Angeles Daily News, "is concerned that retired officers do not have enough training and it creates the impression that the LAPD is staffing the shoots."
That's exactly what happened in the Kimmel lighting crew incident. The pro-life/Kimmel controversy lands in the middle of the LAPD rent-a-cops-wearing-their-uniforms controversy.
One of many problems here in the interest of justice is the built-in bias of rent-a-cops in favor of the film crew they are being paid to protect. If they make waves for members of the very film company that has hired them, they obviously know they'll not get hired again. As one commenter wrote on a previous post, "Don't be fooled. They're to protect the production, not the public."
The next problem is the built-in bias of on-duty cops coming late on the scene to believe what their rent-a-cop brothers tell them about the situation.
Note in the top video the younger cop states on-duty police apprehended White and not the camera crew because "he's instigating this," when, in fact, the opposite was true.
On the other hand, the problem for them now is that the Survivors have an awful lot of video footage. There were 100 pro-life teens on the scene with likely 100 cell phones with video, these in addition to video cameras the Survivors always take to protests to document incidences just such as this.
Following is just one troublesome video for the other side. In it one of the cameramen admits several times he has turned the spotlight on Bueler and his graphic sign of an aborted baby because "I don't want to see that," and "The fact is, I don't want to see it." There are also clear shots of all the camera crew. Note at the very end of the video - after the altercation has been ongoing over 7 minutes - the film crew cops finally show their faces...
The Survivors have uploaded several other snippets from the scene here.
[Top photo via Flikr was taken at a 2009 event for which retired film crew provided security; bottom photo, also from 2009, via the Los Angeles Daily News]
