Say ‘cheesy,’ Councilman Zine

Britney Spears seems to have gotten over the worst of her personal crisis of a year ago, when a full police escort that included two dozen officers and a helicopter was dispatched to shield her from paparazzi as she was taken to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. City Councilman Dennis Zine has not.

Zine has made battling the paparazzi a personal crusade ever since the Spears incident, which is estimated to have cost the Los Angeles Police Department $25,000. He formed a task force to draft laws that would protect celebrities from the prying lenses of tabloid photographers -- and, according to Zine, protect the public from the potentially dangerous nuisance that swarms of paparazzi can pose. It’s a justifiable, if somewhat self-aggrandizing, quest, but the trouble with trying to crack down on predatory lens-jockeys is that it’s almost impossible to craft a law to curb them that doesn’t also curb legitimate news gatherers.

Zine’s first attempt was a city ordinance that would create a “safe zone” to force photographers to keep their distance from their celebrity targets. It stalled after being ridiculed by Police Chief William J. Bratton, who last summer accused Zine of grandstanding and said there are already more than 40 state and local laws to prevent aggressive photographers from endangering the public or invading the privacy of their subjects. Sheriff Lee Baca agreed that no additional anti-paparazzi laws were needed.

Not to be discouraged, in November, Zine proposed an ordinance that would restrict commercial photography and video recordings within 20 feet of the entrances to schools, hospitals and other medical buildings unless photographers have permission from the facility or the subject of the photos. The proposal isn’t just unnecessary, it’s illegal. Under state law, journalists are allowed to enter school grounds without permission -- yet by barring them from a school’s “access zone,” Zine’s ordinance would make it impossible for them to do so. It’s also unconstitutional to restrict the 1st Amendment rights of journalists simply because some have been known to misbehave.

The real problem for celebrities isn’t that there aren’t enough laws on the books to protect them, it’s that existing laws against harassment and creating a public nuisance are seldom enforced against paparazzi. The best way for stars to avoid attracting a horde of marauding image bandits like the one that descended on Spears is to refrain from making a spectacle of themselves. And the best course for Zine would be to drop this campaign.