Only the last sentence of your first paragraph is true: it’s legal to photograph the police and public spaces _but_ doing so may involve you needing to deal with lawless cops and that can be extremely risky depending on who you are and what mood they’re in. Dealing with that culture should be one of our top priorities.

Indeed, the ACLU agrees. Not sure how parent got that bad info, but there’s a rather famous pamphlet called “Photographer’s Rights” meant to carry in your pocket or camera bag to hand to abusive law enforcement, should one run into it.

https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/photographers-rights

https://www.krages.com/phoright.htm

At some point it was illegal in NYC to go out with a with a mask on, while it was also made illegal to go out without a mask on.

(That was when they were both protests that made them ban masks (that obscure the face), and Covid that made them mandate masks. But I think the laws were written broadly enough that both covering and not covering your face were technically forbidden.)

Do you have any reference for that? I live in NYC and was here for the whole pandemic, and this is the first I hear something like that.

I got it from Matt Levine's Money Stuff, Bloomberg email newsletter. It's the post from 2020/04/21:

> Everything is mask crime

> We talked last week about a hypothetical minimalist legal system with only two crimes: Wire fraud, for stuff you do in your house, and coronavirus-related curfew violations, for stuff you do outside your house. If you go to someone’s house and murder them, that’s violation of your local stay-at-home order and you can be arrested for that; who needs a law against murder? I wrote:

> > You’d need a regime of sentencing enhancements (leaving the house to do murder is worse than leaving the house to jaywalk), and you’d probably need like one more law for domestic violence, but the point is that you can get a pretty parsimonious legal system if that’s what you want. I do not actually think it’s what you want.

> The reason you shouldn’t want it is that any sort of minimalist legal system like this leaves huge room for discretion. If the only crime is a fairly common and trivial one like leaving the house, then the people who get prosecuted and severely punished for it might be the ones who leave the house to do murders, but they might not be. They might be people who leave the house and are otherwise disfavored by the police, prosecutors, judges and juries. Poor people, members of minorities, people with unpopular political beliefs, that sort of thing.

> Anyway a fun fact about New York state law (via public defender Sam Feldman) is that now:

> * It is illegal to be around people without a mask, and

> * It is illegal to be around people with a mask on.

> There’s an executive order requiring masks in public when you cannot social distance, and a state law forbidding them. So pretty much anyone who goes outside in New York is breaking the law. Presumably they won’t all be prosecuted.

He quotes https://twitter.com/srfeld/status/1251228271645208577 as the source.

That's a feature for authoritian regimes

This doesn't appear current. I can't find it on government sites for 240.35 (ex: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/240.35)

edit: I can find it before June 2020 so maybe they repealed the ban right after they enacted the mandate?

For the record: it is legal to photograph police in all of the US, and is a protected 1st amendment right. Some states or localities might try to outlaw it, but they always lose when challenged. Some police may simply ignore the law and punish you for exercising your rights, but that's different than it being illegal.

With regards to photography on US railroad tracks, there is no law against it. However, railroad tracks are private property and in the US private property owners can control your photography on their property or trespass you from their property, and due to the danger of pedestrians on tracks, railroads understandably disallow pedestrians on tracks for photography.

This. Some over-aggressive transit police will try to keep you from photographing their trains, but if you're not on their property, they can get over themselves.

I've had transit police notice that I was watching trains, and come over to see what I was doing. I told them that I was watching trains. I was in a place that had a clear view of their platform, and they didn't like me hanging out there and watching. They said they'd like me to watch trains somewhere else. I told them that I was on private property, and it wasn't their private property, so I didn't care what they'd like. (I did have permission from the property owner.) The transit cops didn't say anything more, they just looked rather startled..

Now, if a cop with jurisdiction tells you to leave, you may ask him to cite a statute, but in the end, if they insist on you leaving, you probably need to obey, even if they're wrong. But as you say, they are wrong - it's not illegal to watch railroad tracks from public property, and it's not illegal to photograph.