A former-Arizona security guard tried to censor a video which led to his 2014 assault conviction, published onto PINAC citizen journalist Raymond Michael Rodden’s EMSNews Arizona YouTube channel, which you can see below.
Daniel Lee Ogaz hit Rodden in the head with a soda cup full of ice at the end of the 17 minute encounter on the streets of Tuscon.
“Well, the video is obviously in public and it is evidence of a crime, a crime he plead guilty to,” said Rodden today, “So I don’t know why he’d try to blame me for his own actions. It’s like blaming a rape victim for wearing a short skirt.”
Ogaz still owes the City of Tuscon over $600 in unpaid fines for the incident to this day.
And he’s not alone, as the perpetrators of crimes, ill doers and malcontents file any complaint possible to try and censor the social media, news outlets or anything they can report to try and remove legitimate First Amendment protected speech with true accounts of wrongdoing from the internet.
But as you can see in the video, the security guards didn’t offer their home address information, nor their social security numbers to Raymond Rodden, as they claim in the complaint.
The crime victim will now have to fight to keep the video public.
PINAC News had to fight an unjust termination of our own YouTube account after complaints because we publish news. It was only restored with 400+ irreplaceable news videos after a massive online outcry and a lot of behind the scenes lobbying too.
Even today, PINAC News faces online retaliation from one Lisa Concepcion who is desperate to censor a story where she lied to Carlos Miller, fabricating a South Beach assault on a photographer – not unlike the Ogaz incident – which didn’t actually take place.
Lisa Concepcion’s lies went viral on Facebook, prompting news coverage, but when the story asked the assaulted photographer to step forward, she recanted, admitting that she’d cried wolf for attention.
Now, Concepcion or a cohort reported PINAC News to Google’s Adsense network as being pornographic in nature.
Check out the public domain photo to the right and you be the judge.
If women in bikinis aren’t allowed to be monetized on the web, I dare say that the entire advertising industry would be rocked to its core.
PINAC News is currently attempting to resolve that situation with Google, but we are loathe to water down a story when a legitimate image is used to convey to our audience a news event, in its proper context, like Lisa Concepcion’s publicly available image to the right, sitting on South Beach.
In this case, the citizen journalist Rodden was on a public sidewalk, when Veterans Security employee Ogaz and his partner decided to call police because they didn’t want to be recorded.
It wasn’t a privacy violation when it led to Ogaz’s guilty plea, which Rodden says came about because, “there were multiple witnesses.”
Clearly, these security guards missed the memo that photography is not a crime, and being in public they lacked the expectation of privacy, and that Arizona is a one-party consent state.
So, Rodden was entirely within his First Amendment right to record in public.
And in Arizona, as long as you’re present while recording, one doesn’t need the consent of the person being recorded.
In minute 17, Ogaz tossed his entire Big Gulp soda, filled with ice, hitting Raymond Rodden in the head.
Because of Ogaz’s decision to assault Rodden, he lost his job, and now lists himself on Facebook as a “Pre-School Teacher” which is an epic-fail for screening by whomever decided that someone who resorted to violence while being recorded as a security guard, would be a good protector of little children.
Rodden knows what losing one’s job and livelihood is like, after a brutal police assault which left him in dire straights in 2013 after photographing a courthouse in Phoenix.
Rodden was burtally assaulted in 2014 by Tuscon police, leaving him in the hospital too.
But Raymond Rodden is one of the most persistent citizen journalists you’ll find in America, and without him and his ilk, the true story of Arizona law enforcement’s fetish with abusing photographers would remain unknown to the world.
Turns out that callously indifferent liars, internet trolls and security guards who assault citizen journalists all have one thing common
Plenty of time to complain.
