On July 2, freelance photographer Lance Rosenfield was detained by police in Texas City, Texas, while on assignment for ProPublica to take pictures for a story about BP's refinery there. Rosenfield was briefly detained and questioned on the grounds that taking photographs that included the refinery could threaten national security. Last Friday, The Galveston County Daily News published video footage of the encounter taken from a police dashboard camera.
As our editors have noted, Rosenfield's personal information was provided by the police to a private BP security guard despite Rosenfield’s protests. Watch the police giving Rosenfield’s information to BP here (just over six minutes into the video):
Rosenfield is told that when an unauthorized individual is seen taking pictures of the refinery, protocols from the Department of Homeland Security dictate that BP security gets involved.
“They are a certain type of law enforcement, sir," the policeman, Officer T. Kreitemeyer, said to Rosenfield. When Rosenfield objected to his phone number being included, Krietemeyer told him “that has to deal with homeland security.”
You can also watch the videos of the later parts of the encounter -- including Rosenfield’s discussion with a police liaison to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, shown in the bottom video -- included below:
