A San Diego cop beat up a man whom he was ticketing for illegal smoking, after the man refused to stop video-recording the experience. The cop told the man that he feared the phone might actually be a gun disguised as a phone, before smashing the phone and tackling the man and smashing his face into the boardwalk. He was taken away in an ambulance.

It all seemed pretty civil until the cop writing the citation told him to stop recording, which Pringle refused to do.

"Phones can be converted into weapons …. look it up online," the cop told him.

Last month, a South Florida cop confiscated a man's phone citing the same reason, so maybe this is a new trend.

When Pringle tried to talk sense into the cop, the cop slapped the phone out of his hand where it fell onto the boardwalk and broke apart.

The other cop then pounced on him, slamming him down on the boardwalk where he ended up with a laceration on his chin.

"Blood was everywhere," Pringle said. "I was laying on my stomach and he had one knee on my back and the other knee on the side of my face.

"They kept telling me 'to calm down,' that 'you're making this worse for yourself,' that 'you have no right to record us.'"