A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.

30 December 2014

Did Vince Lovato get busted taking photos he didn’t need?

Update, 27 June 2015. As per his no contest plea (below), Lovato stayed out of legal trouble for six months and the disorderly conduct charge against him was dismissed. End update.

Remember Vince Lovato? The aggressive ex-editor of the Lake County Leader who was arrested on 1 October after getting crosswise with a highway patrolman at the scene of an accident near Polson? His year is ending a lot less worse than it could have ended.

Yesterday, reports the Missoulian’s Vince Devlin, he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor, disorderly conduct:

In exchange for the plea, prosecutors dropped two other misdemeanor charges against Lovato, for obstructing a peace officer and resisting arrest.

Under the agreement, Lovato – who has since been replaced as Leader editor, but continues to work as a reporter and photographer for the weekly newspaper – will pay a $100 fine and $500 in court costs.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In a no-contest plea, defendants neither admit nor dispute their guilt, but concede they could be found guilty if the case went to trial. The court treats a no-contest plea the same as a guilty plea for sentencing purposes.

The charge will be dismissed entirely and removed from his record if Lovato stays out of legal trouble for six months.

That was pretty much the outcome I expected. Vince Lovato's approach to covering the wreck that day was old school. So was the trooper’s conduct with the press. The deal allowed Lovato to receive minimum punishment without admitting guilt while allowing the highway patrolman to save face. But it would have been better had the charges been dismissed and the men had shaken hands and apologized for overreacting.

What Lovato did at the accident scene and police station is one issue. Whether his photographing the wreck made any sense is another. First, what Lovato allegedly did.

According to Devlin’s report, Lovato and his wife were driving in the Polson are when they learned — possibly from a police frequency scanner — that a car and tractor-trailer rig had collided on the east side of Flathead. He drove to the accident’s scene, where he started taking photographs:

[Highway patrolman Tony] Isbell instructed Lovato to step back behind patrol cars that were blocking the accident scene. Court documents alleged that Lovato acknowledged the trooper’s command, but then failed to follow the order.

That led to Isbell arresting and handcuffing Lovato, and charging him with obstructing a peace officer. Isbell also alleged that Lovato pulled away from him, leading to the charge of resisting arrest.

The disorderly conduct charge was a result of Lovato’s alleged behavior after that.

Deputy Lake County Attorney James Lapotka, in his response to Meloy’s motion to dismiss the charges, said that Lovato unleashed a “vitriolic tirade” filled with profanity after being handcuffed, and that it “lasted the entire 23-minute trip all the way to the Lake County jail and continued through the booking procedure where the defendant was verbally abusive with jail staff.”

Lapotka said Lovato “stated that he would get Trooper Isbell’s badge” and “insinuated his political connections and position as a reporter formed a basis for special treatment.”

What was the point of photographing the accident?

A photograph of a wrecked automobile, especially if it’s a tightly cropped image that omits the visual context, provides little or no useful information for the reader.

If we’re reading on the internet, listening to the radio, or watching television, receiving the news in near realtime, we want to know:

  1. Where the accident occurred;
  2. Whether there were injuries or deaths;
  3. Whether the road is blocked (if so, for how long); and
  4. Whether there were contributing factors that could affect drivers taking the same route soon.

Later we’ll learn the names of the victims, the results of the investigations, and legal consequences (if any). A reporter need not be at the accident scene to obtain that information, although being there does provide an opportunity to interview witnesses and officials.

But a photograph of a mangled door and broken windshield, or of blood pooled on the pavement, doesn’t improve our understanding of the accident. It’s a lazy form of photojournalism.

A new approach is needed.

If a photograph of the accident scene is really needed for a news story — a need of which I’m skeptical — a panoramic image of the wreck taken from a point 25 feet above the ground could provide a visual context by showing the position of the cars on the road and the road and scenery. It could be obtained by a photojournalist with a drone who was willing to get arrested and charged with all kinds of serious offenses. But it could also be obtained without fuss or arrest by placing a point-and-shoot camera with HD video on a 20-foot pole and rotating it above the accident scene.

That panorama, published with a map from Google Earth, would be much more useful to the reader than a “if it bleeds, it leads” tabloid image of the Arthur Fellig genre. It would be even more useful if the map displayed icons identifying previous wrecks at the same spot (done rather easily if all wrecks in Montana were geo-referenced, coded for cause and details, and available through an online GIS database).