Police No Longer Above The Law in Poland Submitted by: DATA Lab
2013-09-16 04:34:43
The rising popularity of video recording devices has unveiled some of the police's faults. This is particularly the case in ex-communist countries, like Poland.
Although communism is a thing of the past in this part of Europe, some traditions are still there. Police's over-representation and domination is one of them. A recent incident in Poznan (a city located in the west of Poland,) is a great example of that trend. A journalist working for a Polish private television, TTV, has captured a police car ignoring a dead end street sign. Then, he approached the policemen to learn more about why they did that.
From now on, there are two conflicting accounts that differ totally. On the one side, there is the journalist who claims that he was attacked by the officers. He recalls that the very moment he started to capture the whole event on film, the policemen got angry. I've seen a police car running down a dead-end street. So, I took my cellphone out and started filming. They saw that and came to me asking, why I did this, says Artur Zakrzewski, the journalist. Then, they made a thorough check of Zakrzewski's documents and personal belongings. During that search, when Zakrzewski demanded some explanation, one of the officers took his cellphone away. At the same time, they were trying to break my wrist, Zakrzewski recalls.
That example of police brutality may come as a surprise. As the policeman claims, he just wanted to check the anti-theft software (cellphone stealth rates in Poland are really high.) And it was really the journalist who acted in an aggressive way — that's the officer's account.
The reporter complains that the law officers managed to remove all the data from his cellphone. They deleted all my private photos and videos! That's not fair! According to Zakrzewski, they were just trying to get rid of the evidence of their unlawful actions.
Zakrzewski regained the video and a few days later, it has become a massive hit in the Polish Web. There are lots of discussions about that incident going on in the Polish public sphere. The public opinion appears truly shaken by the officers' actions.
The reporter managed to recover the deleted video thanks to a Poznan-headquartered data recovery laboratory - Data Lab - http://www.datalab.pl/ . They specialize in fixing broken files and recovering data from both hardware (technical, physical) and software (logical) damages. Data Lab is one of the most reputable companies in the data safety and recovery branch in Poland. It started its operations in year 2000 and since then has dynamically expanded its client database to the whole territory of Poland. Now it boasts 200 offices scattered throughout the country as well as many awards such as the prestigious "The Best in Poland" title (�€�Najlepsze w Polsce").
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DATA Lab
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