Florida Cops Pry into Man’s Records more than 200 Times because he Refuses to Stop Recording them

After several years of auditing police departments across Florida to determine whether their officers uphold the First Amendment and the law of the land, Photography Is Not A Crime’s Jeff Gray has had his driver’s license and vehicle tag information searched by police well over 200 times.

Gray’s request for the record of who accessed his information on the state-operated Driver and Vehicle Information Database (DAVID) turned up police officer after police officer running Gray’s vehicle plate and driver’s license.

PINAC is now working to cross-check the dates of when Gray’s records were run against the times when Gray conducted First Amendment audits. It’s safe to say that few people would be surprised to learn that officers ran Gray’s record in the DAVID system simply because Gray was recording video in public.

On October 22, 2013, Gray, along with PINAC Publisher Carlos Miller and public records guru Joel Chandler, were detained by Coral Gables police after making a public records request as you can see in the above photo. The following day, Gray was arrested by Brevard County deputies for recording a traffic stop.

During the arrest, one of the deputies mentioned that Gray had been detained by Coral Gables a day earlier – automatically branding him a troublemaker – when he hadn’t broken the law in either case. Both dates are documented in the report Gray obtained last week along with the corresponding agencies.

The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles is in charge of the system, but employees from local, state and federal agencies across the state can access the information. The system holds not only people’s license records, but social security information, addresses, photos, marital status, and even bank information.

Unsurprisingly, there have been...Read the rest HERE