A Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Captain named Greg Smart was stupid enough to think a citizen recording with an iPad was a “combative bystander.”
Miami photographer Taylor Hardy was far from combative Thursday, standing acrossthe street from an open field where a helicopter was landing to airlift a stabbing victim to the hospital.
Hardy said he was driving in the area in Southwest Miami-Dade when he saw a fire engine race by, so he went to check it out, parking his car across the street and stepping out with his iPad.
Nobody even noticed him until after 3:15 in the video when Smart and another fire-rescue official came storming up to him, ordering him to stop recording and leave the area.
They told him he had to leave because he was somehow intruding on “personal information.” Hardy countered by telling them it was a “public area.”
The information wasn’t so personal that the local media didn’t write about it, reporting that a janitor had been stabbed to death in a nursing home, which tells us the two paramedics maybe should have been focusing more on their patient.
Smart kept shoving Hardy back, speaking into his radio that he was dealing with a “combative bystander.”
Even after Hardy stepped behind some bushes, showing he was anything but combative, Smart insisted that he keep walking away.
Smart finally relented once the copter finally took off, obviously believing he had done his duty to protect the privacy of the victim.
But Smart was not smart enough to prevent the news helicopters from capturing a better video than Hardy ever would have done with his iPad from across the street as you can see in the video below.
