Welcome to the Terror Zone

<<<<I spent the better part of the Spring and Summer in the Pacific Northwest. I got back to New Jersey the day after the Orange Alert was declared, and was quite unprepared for the level of security. In fact, I wound up getting stopped by the Union County Police and detained for several hours for taking photographs in my own neighborhood.

Union County, New Jersey is about 20 miles Southeast of Manhattan. The western part is wealthy, green suburban. The eastern part is blue-collar, industrial, part of the Elizabeth/Newark urban sprawl. I've lived in Roselle, a working-class, mostly black/Hispanic town for most of my life. I'm comfortable there (even though I'm white). I like the lack of upper middle-class pretension you find in the western part of county, the lack of social control that comes in the form of having to wear the right kind of preppy clothing or making sure your house looks exactly like your neighbors. I can take long walks without feeling self-conscious. In Seattle or New York, you can't walk half a block without getting panhandled. In preppy Westfield, you can't walk a block without realizing you're being sized up. In industrial Roselle, you can walk though the whole town without feeling as if you're being watched.

Well, you could.

Roselle is a few miles away from Newark, from the Prudential Building, from the designated "terror zone" and, as I found out upon my return from the Pacific Northwest, taking photographs is now considered a "suspicious" activity that marks you off as a potential "terrorist."

What happened?

I destroyed my Digital Rebel on a trip to Southeast Alaska (fell right into a muskeg pit up to my neck) so I decided to upgrade to a Nikon D70. It was waiting for me (in its sleek, black, semi-professional glory) when I got back. New Jersey is hot in the summer, hot and humid, but I was happy to be back in "blue" America after small town Alaska, so I decided to take a long walk through my neighborhood with my new D70 to get up to speed on all of its bells and whistles. I started walking, just taking pictures of what struck my fancy.

Then I came to a local power station.

OK. I realize that power stations, railroad tracks, police stations, local industrial plants under Orange Alert are considered "sensitive" (the way they were in the old Soviet Union) but this particular power station happens to be located behind the abandoned railroad tracks where I spent most of my unhappy childhood hiding out from my parents. It's the place I went to when I cut class in high school. It's a place that's always seemed a million miles away from anything in the world that's remotely important. In short, it's part of my private landscape. I feel safe there. I feel at home and it never really occurred to me that my private landscape is now part of The Terror Zone, so I just snapped a photo.

100 feet and 2 minutes later, I was surrounded by squad cars from the Union County, Roselle Park, and Cranford Police Departments. I was put up against the squad car, photographed, asked about my political affiliations, grilled as to whether I was part of "Earth First" or "Greenpeace," asked about whether or not I knew if "environmental terrorists" had "blown up a Hummer Dealership" a few weeks before, and informed that my camera could be confiscated and that federal agents could quite possibly show up at my doorstep over the next few weeks.

In keeping with the fact that I feel "at home" in the spot where I was questioned, I didn't allow myself to be cowed. I asked the police if I had been doing anything illegal (no, I had not, but it still didn't mean that federal agents wouldn't look into me anyway). I asked them if they were planning to stop people like this during the election (they said that yes they would if ordered). And I asked them for their names and badge numbers, which they refused to give me since, they argued, it would all be on the police report. The next day, when I went down to the Union County Police Department to get a copy of the police report, I was told that I was a suspect in an ongoing investigation and, as a result, couldn't have it. I'm still trying to get a copy.

What's more, as I was driving home from the police station after trying unsuccessfully to get a copy of the police report *I was promised I'd have access to by the police* something occurred to me.

Anybody in the industrial area in western Roselle/eastern Cranford could do any number of illegal things (from dumping toxic waste to evading local safety codes) and I wouldn't be able to document any of it. All the lawbreaker would have to do would be to report me as a "terrorist" and the cops would detain me, confiscate my film (compact flash) and threaten me with scrutiny by the feds. I'm sure we're going to see quite a bit of this in the future.