Videotaping Leads to Arrest at UCSD Campus

Michael Weir considers himself an observer of life--a hobby that took on a new dimension last month when he bought his first professional-quality video camera.

A visual arts student at UC San Diego, he joined the Hard Core Film Club there and began shooting live footage of events going on around him.

Recently, Weir’s budding filmmaking career took a controversial twist when he was handcuffed and arrested at the La Jolla campus while assisting another student in videotaping university police and parking officers.

The 30-year-old student and father of two had come to the aid of a UC San Diego graduate student, Dietmar Walther, who had begun filming a campus parking officer. The uniformed officer was issuing a ticket to another student motorist whose car was parked in a loading area known as “The Pit.”

Campus police who were summoned to the scene began questioning Walther about why he was videotaping the parking officer’s work. All the while, Walther kept the camera going.

The police asked Walther to stop filming. So the 28-year-old German-born student passed the camera over to Weir--who then began to capture the conversations on tape himself.

The resulting 10-minute recorded segment shows the officers consenting to be taped but continually telling Weir to move back from the immediate scene.

Shouting “This is how America feels about art!” and “Welcome to the police state of UCSD!” Weir was eventually arrested and cited on a misdemeanor charge of interfering with an officer in the line of duty.

Weir says he was arrested unfairly for practicing video art. Campus police beg to differ, saying the bespectacled student was obstructing justice by keeping officers from performing their jobs.

Given the nationwide fallout from the videotaped beating of a defenseless motorist at the hands of Los Angeles police last year, Weir says a nervous campus policeman arrested him solely because he objected to being filmed.

“These days, when a police officer sees a citizen with a video camera, the first thing that comes to his mind is Rodney King,” Weir said. “When they see that camera documenting their actions, they either under react or overreact. In this case, they definitely overreacted.”

John Anderson, chief of campus police, said that police are by no means intimidated by citizens with video cameras--Rodney King or no Rodney King.

“This is not an issue of videotaping,” he said. “It’s an issue of videotaping one foot from the officer’s face. This student was not letting the officer perform his job. That’s why he was arrested. His rights were not violated. It was the officer who had his rights curtailed.”

The incident has sparked tension between campus police and the university’s visual arts department, which had threatened to contact Chancellor Richard Atkinson on the topic of overzealous police enforcement.

“This is all wrong,” said Fred Lonidier, a professor in the school’s visual arts department. “Everything they did is wrong from my point of view. For starters, they arrested the wrong student.”

“You can harass someone with a video camera. The question is whether that is what happened here,” he said.

The tensions were aggravated by another incident Monday night, when a video arts class staged and secretly filmed an incident in which a male student from among its ranks who in an effeminate voice asked a student working for campus security for an escort to his car. The film was an apparent attempt to see if the escort would insult the student, campus officials say, but the escort didn’t rise to the bait.

Anderson said he was annoyed by the obvious baiting of a member of his staff and said he plans to have a word with the dean of the university.

“That was not funny,” he said. “They deliberately set this student up just to film his reaction from what could have been an uncomfortable situation. The chancellor needs to have a word with the chairman of the visual arts department. The police department is not here to be mocked or to have games played on us.”

Walther said Tuesday that Weir’s arrest grew out of a chronic shortage of parking for students on campus--as well as what he called the confrontational attitude of some parking officers.

For the more than 18,000 students on the burgeoning campus, parking has become a sensitive issue in recent years as university officials have moved car lots farther from the campus center, forcing students to ride shuttle buses to and from the far-flung lots.

“It’s a pain,” said Walther, a graduate student in the school’s visual arts department who also works as a teacher’s assistant for some classes. “You have to drive around forever looking for a spot.”

Students waiting for buses often miss classes, he said. And recently, officials did away with 38 prime parking spots in the middle of campus.

“Some days, the parking officers give hundreds of tickets,” Walther said. “It’s a major source of income for the university so they’re very strict about it. The system is set up to make money.”

In early February, as Walther considered ways to illustrate the university’s parking woes on film, he spotted a parking officer outside the Mandeville Center chalking the tire of his car--a technique commonly used so officials know which vehicles have exceeded the 20-minute limit.

As a mild protest, he asked the officer to autograph his artwork on the tire. Walther said the officer responded by threatening to write him a ticket, saying, “I like to play games with people who don’t want to play by the rules.”

Two days later, on Feb. 5th, Walther spotted the uniformed parking enforcement officer ticketing another student at same loading area. This time, he had his video camera and began filming the incident.

“It was a spontaneous thing,” he said. “I didn’t go there planning to do any film. It just happened.”

The parking officer demanded that Walther stop filming. When he repeatedly refused, continuing to tape his own conversation, the officer radioed for campus police, saying that he had been harassed by Walther only two days before.

Walther said Tuesday that, while he thought the camera was in fact capturing the incident, he had forgotten to release the pause mode and wasn’t taping.

A campus policeman who arrived on bicycle asked Walther not to videotape while he spoke with the officers. Enter Weir, who had taken visual arts classes in which Walther had served as a teacher’s assistant.

Weir offered to take the camera and noticed that the pause mode was still on. He made an adjustment and started taping.

“I thought it was important that the incident continue to be documented,” Weir said. “I couldn’t see him having to put the camera down. I thought that would have been baloney and so I offered to take it. It was a camaraderie thing.”

As Walther talked with officers, Weir repeatedly moved in slowly to more closely capture their conversation--and was repeatedly told by officers to move back. He says he does not recall how close he came to the officers.

At one point, the videotape records him telling the three officers on the scene: “I’m an artist and this is my studio. You’re in my studio.”

Later, without making reference to an arrest, officers again ask Weir to step back. “How come I have to move?” he responds. “How come I have to get arrested, too?”

Anderson says that, while Weir was free to videotape, the conversation between Walther and the officers was considered private.

“The thing that disturbs me here is that just days before this incident a professor in the visual arts department gave a talk on legal rights in photography and what people can get away with,” Anderson said.

“I really believe these students were pushing hard to see what they could get away with. They just didn’t think we’d take any action.”

Walther sees things differently.

“I have the feeling that the officers didn’t know how to get out of the situation,” he said. “They couldn’t leave without doing anything. So they created the problem, telling Mike to back off and then arresting him.”

When officers moved in to arrest Weir, Walther rescued his video recorder and continued taping as officers handcuffed Weir and placed him in a police car. He is scheduled to appear in San Diego municipal court on March 25.

Meanwhile, his attorney, Jodi White, said Weir’s civil rights were violated because campus security had no right to enforce prior restraint on a film he might legally have made.

Detective Sgt. Bob Jones of campus police said students don’t have to be afraid of videotaping police on campus. They’ve come to expect it, he says, because they themselves use videotaping on the job.

“It’s 1992,” he said. “And the reality of the situation is that we encourage our officers not to be camera-shy. The Rodney King incident hasn’t sent any shudders through this department.”