Rockville Resident Uses YouTube to Monitor Police

A 25-year-old Rockville resident was arrested and charged with obstruction and hindering after recording his interactions with police with a video camera on January 15.

The resident, Jared Parr, posted the video and audio of the interaction on his YouTube channel, Rockville CopWatch, where he has posted a number of videos covering the police activity in Rockville.

Patch spoke with Parr to find out, among other things, why he started RockvilleCopWatch and what he hoped to accomplish through his videos and actions.

Rockville: What made you start Rockville CopWatch?

Jared Parr: Police interaction is nothing new to me, it goes back since I was pretty young, and it’s never been positive from what I remember. Admittedly, there were some times when I deserved it, but a lot of times I didn’t. I was kind of put off by what seemed like a systemic problem of harassment and intimidation.

In school, that’s what they teach you. You can trust a police officer. As I got older, I realized—no, you can’t trust police officers. They’re trained to incriminate you, to have you incriminate yourself rather.

I saw a systemic problem, and I wanted to hold them accountable and help people realize that these are supposed to be public servants. They’re supposed to be protecting people, not trying to incriminate them, especially when they haven’t done anything.

Patch: Are there any specific incidents in the past that made you think, I really need to do something about this?

JP: I think it was a combination of a lot of incidents. Some of it was merited on my part, I admit to that, but regardless, it was also just the way that they treated you. Even if it were an asinine thing, they would still treat you like less than human. It’s this mentality that I quickly started to see that they don’t respect the people that they’re supposed to be serving.

Patch: Were you getting positive feedback or support when you started the channel?

JP: A lot of my friends were like, ‘What’s the point of this?’ and ‘It’s a waste of time.’ My response to that was, ‘You do what you can, when you can.’ If you have the ability to record something, just record it. If you have extra time, just do it because that has saved a lot of people. There’s been a lot of cases where it’s just somebody walking by, and they see something going on and they record it, and that dramatically changes the outcome of the case.

Patch: How much time do you devote to Rockville CopWatch?

JP: It varies. For a while I was doing a lot of speed camera warning in Rockville. Just holding a sign saying ‘speed trap’ so people would slow down.
I really don’t devote a super amount of time to it. It’s not consuming my life. When I have time, I’ll do it. Maybe once a week for a little bit.

Patch: What are your plans for the future of Rockville CopWatch?

JP: I definitely plan on continuing to do it because the problem isn’t resolved.
I hope other people start joining, but as far as commitment, you just do what you can when you can and you can’t really ask for anything more than that.