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Actual police video of Samhain 1996 and activist video of police videotaping cannabis activists in Asheville City Council meeting, 1998, released here for the first time.
See articles about our video release:
- Asheville Citizen-Times, “Wiccans release internal police video of Halloween Witch Rite”
- The Wild Hunt, “Asheville Newspaper Sues Police over Surveillance Videos”
Smuggled APD video released
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 12/17/2014
Asheville, North Carolina
For decades local Wiccan authors Dixie Deerman (Lady Passion) and *Diuvei (Steve Rasmussen) have been police-reform activists encouraging public scrutiny of Asheville Police Department policies — ranging from the arrest of pro-peace marchers and the automatic charging with resisting arrest of victims of cops’ excessive force, to questioning the department’s motive in buying a riot tank.
Amid widespread national allegations of police abuse of power, the pair are now releasing online two videos that spotlight the APD’s longstanding practice of filming citizens who are legally participating in permitted special events or engaging in public input at City Council meetings.
One of the films is from APD’s own archive, smuggled out of the department by an officer uncomfortable with the practice. Showing a cops’-eye view of Coven Oldenwilde’s 1996 downtown annual Halloween (Samhain) Public Witch Rite, the seven-minute excerpt features the APD video taper refusing to answer a participant demanding to know who he represented, APD or a drug-enforcement agency, as well as other revealing and sometimes unintentionally humorous scenes. (Full 19-minute video available upon request.)
The second video, from a fellow activist’s point-of-view, shows a uniformed and an undercover cop filming residents waiting to give public input to Asheville City Council about the proposal to make marijuana the lowest priority of city law enforcement, and the same plainclothes cop filming them actively appealing to Council-members in chambers. The 3-minute clip, shot in Sept. 1998 by a member of Community of Compassion for Cannabis, features the police officers’ evasions or refusal to answer the activists’ questions when challenged about their identities and purpose.
“As long ago as 2000, when the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA) was considering renewing APD’s accreditation, Lady Passion and I publicly pointed out how their arbitrary and secretive videotaping practices violate basic national standards,” states *Diuvei. “Fourteen years later, APD continues to film people without any transparency or accountability.”
“We deem it outrageous,” Lady Passion adds, “that they refuse to reassure the public about their storage methods, who has access to the footage, and if and how the film is ever destroyed. It’s easy to conclude that the APD turns sinister cameras on people who assemble in an attempt to repress their free speech.”
The videos can be viewed on Coven Oldenwilde’s YouTube channel, youtube.com/user/oldenwilde, and website: oldenwilde.org.
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Contact: Lady Passion (Dixie Deerman) or *Diuvei (Steven Rasmussen) at: oldenwilde@oldenwilde.org
Phone: (828) 251-0343
Cell: (828) 335-2486