Chicago journalist struck with police bike while covering protests

Raven Geary, who operates the independent outlet Jinx Press, was struck with a bicycle by a Chicago Police Department officer while documenting a pro-Palestinian protest planned to coincide with the nearby Democratic National Convention on Aug. 20, 2024.

A small gathering of protesters, unaffiliated with and more militant than other groups that had organized larger demonstrations earlier in the week, converged around 7 p.m. outside the Israeli Consulate in Chicago’s West Loop section. The demonstrators and police, who far outnumbered them, clashed repeatedly. The protesters were later ordered to leave the area and police began arresting them, Block Club Chicago reported.

Geary told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that the protest “blew up really quickly.”

“There was such a massive show of police, unlike we normally see, and a lot of just unclear directions — both to protesters and to journalists — about what the police wanted us to do,” she said. “At a certain point I guess they were giving dispersal orders over a megaphone, for example, and where I was situated I never even heard a single audible dispersal order.”

She added that those who said they did hear the orders to disperse reported that police blocked them from doing so.

Police corralled protesters and press multiple times over the course of several hours, Geary said, and at one point an officer struck her in the leg with a bicycle, bruising her. She told the Tracker that she was clearly identifiable as media and was wearing Jinx Press media credentials, but that given the chaos of the scene, she couldn’t be certain whether she was deliberately targeted.

When reached by email for comment, the Chicago Police Department directed the Tracker to CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling’s news conferences during the DNC, declining to respond to questions about officers’ aggression toward journalists and reported attempts to revoke press credentials.

“We want to allow you to do your jobs. We really do. But there are times when we’re calling a mass arrest or we’re attempting to move in, we need you guys to step to the side,” Snelling said of journalists during the Aug. 21 news conference. “If you don’t do that, it’s obstructing us and it makes it harder for us to take the people into custody that we’re trying to take into custody. And what we don’t want is for you to get caught in the middle of it and injured and hurt.”

At least four other journalists were shoved or pulled by officers responding to the protests outside the consulate that day, and at least three were arrested.