(police)coverage you can count on

[sapphoto]

While watching the competition tonight I heard an alarming statement. An anchor stated that while covering a fight/shooting in an are plauged by riots last year, their station's photojournalist gave his camera to the police to shoot video for them.

Is this unethical? I think it's unethical. I think that no matter how badly I needed video I would not enlist the police to shoot for me. I feel this is a dangerous precedent. How can we expect to get balanced un-censored video. I can't put my finger on it but it just seemed to rub me the wrong way.

[photogguy]

Forget about the ethics...there is NO F***ING WAY I'm giving my camera to anyone outside the employ of the station to shoot video. I'm the one responsible for that 50-thousand dollar camera.

[Raiderfan]

First I will speak about handing your camera over. I sure as hell am not going to hand my camera to anyone! I don't care who it is. Hell I hate having to share my gear with people, so for me to turn it over to someone else to shoot with it, f that!
As for the ethics. It is unethical. You are passing something off as if you shot it there. This isn't the same as revoicing a national package or medical package(personally I hate that and in some little way think it's wrong to pass that off as your own). To just let the police do it, is wrong. We had a disturbance in Madison around halloween that a photog ended up getting pepper sprayed, but hell he shot it(he had a mini-DV, so it wasn't known that he was there with his big ole Betacam screaming TV News here!) Now that is how you get video of something like that. Not by going hey copper, here's my camera, it's rolling, can you just take it with you and we will take any video you can get us.

[panic photog]

I think it's BS!!! What would have been said if the camera was damaged? Ah, why are you not hurt but the camera is destroyed? Now getting police video that thy shot with their own equipment, a long shot, but then I would accept that with a courtesy to the department.

[<vidrock>]

I agree with not handing your gear over. But my question, if there were riots going on, shouldn't the police be more interested in putting an end to it, rather than shoot b-roll for somebody? Our tax dollars at work!!!!!!!!

[G_Roll]

Yeah...why did they agree to that in the first place. Shouldn't they be worrying about people's safety rather than shooting video.

And for the guy that gave his camera up so the police could shoot the video for him...he should have his head examined.

[Salty Dog]

I'll bet the camera was a small consumer camera, not the photog's full-size professional cam.

And for having them shoot video for you...why not? If you have a home video cam that they can lug around with them on their bust, there may not be anything wrong or unethical with that as long as it's treated properly. It would likely need to be supered as "police video" and it probably wouldn't hurt to have the anchors inform the audience as well.

News stations use corporate video sources all the time that are cleaned-up, washed-down versions of what the corporation what's the news stations to use. As long as you have the raw video from the bust and it's treated properly, so not to decieve the public, it doesn't sound like that bad of an idea.

[<rackfocus>]

True story. Several years ago we had just purchased one the first small "walkman" size mini-DV cameras. Someone on our staff wanting an in with the cops lent it to the vice squad to sneak it into adult-oriented businesses to get proof of sex violations. A crowd eagarly gathered in the edit room when the cops returned to have it transferred to vhs. There were a lot of dissapointed faces when it became clear the undercover officer had double punched the camera and all he had was a few frames of girls and about 30 minutes of the front seat of his car.