My Cannery story hits the press

My "backroomed by casino security goons" incident is featured in the Las Vegas Review-Journal today. See here.

For me, the most interesting parts are the Cannery's official response, the gaming board official's comments, and the response of the North Las Vegas police, none of which I had heard before.

The Cannery:

Cannery spokesman Tom Willer said that although there is no rule explicitly
prohibiting photography in the casino, guards considered Woolley a security
threat.

Aha! So the several guards who told me it was a violation of their company policy to take pictures were all either lying or inexcusably uninformed.

"(He) appeared to be taking photos of surveillance camera positions,"
Willer said. "That would be a problem for any casino operator. He did not wish
to cooperate with us and show us the photos he was taking, or he had taken. So
we asked him to leave the property."

For reasons stated in my original post on the story, this is peculiar reasoning. Surveillance camera positions are pretty much everywhere, which (1) makes it hard to take a photo that didn't include them, if the camera is aimed even vaguely upwards, and (2) makes trying to map their position for nefarious purposes completely futile. Sure, if there are only three cameras in the whole place, and you'll want to be able to knock them out before you attack the cage, you'll want to know where they are. But there are hundreds, placed every 20 feet or less. There's no way that even a detailed blueprint of where they all are would be criminally useful, as far as I can determine.

Also, he is being incredibly deceptive when he tells the story this way. I refused to show them the pictures, so they asked me to leave??? Hell, no! I tried to leave, and they wouldn't let me! He kind of omits that rather crucial detail.


Gaming Control Board:

"There are no rules against it, and there are no rules or regulations that
govern it," Randy Sayre, a member of the Nevada Gaming Control Board, said of
shooting photos in Nevada casinos.

This matches my research, done after the fact. I searched the gaming regulations and statutes to see if there was anything that required casinos to bar photography, and found no such thing.

But he added that companies are free to prohibit the practice. They are
also authorized to detain customers deemed to be security risks until police
arrive.

Since this isn't an exact quotation, it's hard to know precisely what the guy said, and therefore whether he stated the facts inexactly or whether the paraphrase is inaccurate. It is not correct as stated, however. Casinos do not have the statutory power to detain people "deemed to be security risks." Their detention authority includes only the cases in which they have reason to believe the person has violated the statutes governing gaming (chapter 465 of the Nevada statutes) or has committed some other felony. There is also the generic citizen's arrest right, which covers "public offense"--and, unlike the casino-specific provisions, under this statute there must have been an actual public offense, not mere suspicion of one. Nothing that I did could reasonably qualify for that. See towards the end of the original post about the incident here for links to the specific statutes on this stuff.


North Las Vegas police:

However, Sayre said, customers are under no legal obligation to reveal
photos upon request.

Sgt. Tim Bedwell, spokesman for the North Las Vegas
Police Department, concurred.

Bedwell said North Las Vegas police responded to the Cannery call over
Woolley's pictures partly because Woolley was reportedly "very upset and being
verbal."

After they assessed the situation they determined Woolley was within his
rights to refuse to share pictures.

"Very upset" is hard to assess objectively, since it describes an emotion rather than observable behavior. Of course I was upset at being harassed, imprisoned, sworn at, lied to, accused of plotting to rob the place, and otherwise generally treated like a criminal when I had done nothing wrong--nothing that even violated casino policy, I now learn.

Was I acting upset? Well, that all depends on your meaning of the term. It would absolutely be inaccurate to say that I was acting agitated, which would, I think, be the most common interpretation of acting "upset." That is, I was not running, fighting, flailing my arms, going bug-eyed, etc. No witness could legitimately say that I was looking like I was out of control or on the verge of becoming a physical threat. I was never combative nor could anybody reasonably say that I appeared to be so. That is simply not in my nature, unless provoked considerably beyond what the Cannery goons did (i.e., you will have to cause me to think you are launching a potentially life-threatening assault on me in order to provoke a combative reaction from me).

But I was certainly being "verbal" about the fact that they had no right to be detaining me. I was also definitely being "verbal" about what morons the security guards were--for example, one of them explicitly confusing an alleged Cannery policy with a felony, and claiming that the owner of private property can do to a visitor whatever he or she wants to do. I do not suffer fools gladly, and I was, very literally, surrounded by fools. I was not shy in letting them know that I felt that way. My speech, however, although definitely barbed in content, was never loud, uncontrolled, or profane, though those characteristics were definitely present in the speech that they were directing at me. In short, at all times I was under considerably better self-control than the security guards were.

Also, I have some vague recollection of hearing something about "freedom of speech" somewhere. I did not know that a person being "verbal" was now legitimate grounds for a police investigation. Maybe that "freedom of speech" thing doesn't apply in North Las Vegas, Nevada.

One wonders how the call to the police went down.

Casino: "Yeah, we have a guy detained here. He's being verbal."

Police dispatcher: "For God's sake, don't let him get away! We're sending the SWAT team right now!"

Anyway, it's overall a good story, I think. Thanks to the reporter, Benjamin Spillman, for getting relevant responses from those other entities, as well as for getting all of the facts of what happened right (in my experience, this is, sadly, a rarity for the media). It would have been interesting to have statements from other casinos about what their photography policies are, but there is only so much space in the newspaper.


Addendum

I see now that Vegas Rex, who is also quoted in the Review-Journal story, beat me to getting a response up on his blog. Check it out here.