“I took the picture on my phone and suddenly this security guard came up and told me it wasn’t allowed because I could be a paedophile.
“I told him Ben was my own son. But he said I couldn’t prove it. He said there is a real problem with paedophiles and that if I didn’t like it, he’d call the manager.
And then the situation escalated a bit more.
Funny that a guy is given all this grief for taking a photo of his son, which no one wants to believe is his son, but then he is allowed to take the kid’s hand and presumably leave with him to go home. I mean, if they were so insistent he shouldn’t even be allowed to photograph the child in a public location, because he might not be the guy’s son, then why did they let the two leave together?
Anyway, stupid people behaving stupidly. So unfortunate the stupid people in this case were security guards and police officers.
The police over here have a problem with photographers. They get kicked about it all the time and it dies down for a few months then they do it again.
I do hope the father makes a complaint, since the police absolutely do not have the right to delete your photographs.
The police over here have a problem with photographers.
The UK police do seem to lose their minds over photographers and videographers every so often, don’t they? Usually, it’s in ways I can imagine happening here too, because I sometimes get spoken too by guards or cops when downtown doing architectural shots, but thus far no actual hassles (probably because I am a cute, harmless looking female). This case in particular though, I don’t know if that would even happen in the US. Maybe it is, but it doesn’t make the news.
The whole thing with them saying they can delete his photos? Yeah, that made my head explode.
What happenned was that someone in authority took leave of their senses and tried to issue advice to the public on billboards saying that photographers are almost never worth worrying about but if you do think one of them is doing something criminal then you can always call the police.
This came across as saying that if a photographer looks at all strange (say, because they’re a human being) then you must call the police and a sizeable minority of the public will do that. The police can’t handle the weight of phone calls this generates so they have to be arseholes to photographers or admit that their higher-ups issued stupid advice.