first_published_at,last_published_at,title,slug,latest_revision_created_at,charges,legal_orders,updates,categories,links,equipment_seized,equipment_broken,targeted_journalists,authors,date,exact_date_unknown,city,state,latitude,longitude,body,introduction,teaser,teaser_image,primary_video,image_caption,arrest_status,arresting_authority,release_date,detention_date,unnecessary_use_of_force,case_number,case_statuses,case_type,status_of_seized_equipment,is_search_warrant_obtained,actor,border_point,target_us_citizenship_status,denial_of_entry,stopped_previously,did_authorities_ask_for_device_access,did_authorities_ask_about_work,assailant,was_journalist_targeted,charged_under_espionage_act,subpoena_type,subpoena_statuses,name_of_business,third_party_business,legal_order_target,legal_order_type,legal_order_venue,status_of_prior_restraint,mistakenly_released_materials,type_of_denial,targeted_institutions,tags,target_nationality,workers_whose_communications_were_obtained,politicians_or_public_figures_involved 2024-02-29 16:19:57.942906+00:00,2024-02-29 16:45:12.335647+00:00,"Student journalists, adviser sue school, alleging intimidation",https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/student-journalists-adviser-sue-school-alleging-intimidation/,2024-02-29 16:45:12.210026+00:00,,,,Other Incident,,,,"Hanna Olson (Mountain View High School Oracle), Hayes Duenow (Mountain View High School Oracle)",,2024-02-22,False,Mountain View,California (CA),38.00881,-122.11746,"
Student journalists and the former adviser of a high school newspaper in California filed a lawsuit against the school district and administrators on Feb. 22, 2024, alleging intimidation and retaliation in violation of the state’s student press freedom law.
According to the complaint, the Oracle newspaper at Mountain View High School is entirely student-run, with the young journalists choosing, writing and editing their own articles. Former faculty adviser Carla Gomez would review articles before publication and provide guidance on journalistic standards and techniques.
In early 2023, students on the newspaper’s In-Depth team — which produces long-form investigative articles — began reporting on allegations of student-on-student sexual harassment at the school. Administrators learned of the article when students contacted them for comment.
Principal Kip Glazer spoke to the students on March 27, telling them that the planned article would lead to “catastrophic consequences” if published and that the newspaper should only present the school in a “positive light,” according to the suit. She also asserted that she could censor the article, but that she did not want to, and asked to review the piece before publication.
The students told reporters for The Talon, a student newspaper at a nearby high school, that following Glazer’s review they made some changes for journalistic reasons, but made many more because they were afraid of upsetting her.
“We were kind of confused and kind of scared of what her implications were,” Assistant In-Depth Editor Renuka Mungee said of Glazer’s mandate. “Was the entire Oracle going to get in trouble? Were we individually going to get in trouble for publishing it? I think we felt compelled to remove certain details because we were scared of what her reaction would be or what the consequences would be.”
Mungee and In-Depth Editor Myesha Phukan told the Talon that though they had followed journalistic and ethical best practices when reporting the piece, they ultimately self-censored: a decision they said they’ve come to regret
A modified version of the article was published on March 31, but without descriptions of some of the harassment, details of one of the accused harasser’s participation in the choir program or other contextual information, according to the suit. Less than a month later, Glazer announced that the school’s Introduction to Journalism course was being cut and that Gomez was being replaced as the newspaper’s adviser.
Glazer, who did not respond to requests for comment, told the Talon in May that she is a staunch supporter of the First Amendment and student journalism.
“I believe that the purpose of public education is to create an educated populace for the protection of democracy, and I believe that the role of the press is extremely important,” Glazer said. “Democracy doesn’t exist without a robust and free press.”
Attorney Jean-Paul Jassy sent a letter on behalf of Gomez and Hanna Olson, co-editor-in-chief, to the superintendent, board of trustees and Glazer on Sept. 27 detailing the alleged intimidation and retaliation, and requested the release of communications surrounding the incident.
The letter also asked for a written acknowledgement that Glazer’s actions amounted to censorship in violation of California Education Code 48907, a reinstatement of the introductory course with Gomez as the adviser and a written commitment that there would be no further attempts at censorship.
When those requests were not met, Jassy filed the lawsuit making similar requests on behalf of Gomez, Olson and Hayes Duenow, one of the authors of the article.
“The ideas and the principles that underlie the First Amendment are first experienced and first taught to students when they’re in high school or college,” Jassy told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. “So it’s really important that they have the liberty to do investigative journalism, to do research and to report on issues in their communities, just like the professional or mainstream media do.”
Gomez told the Tracker that she hopes the lawsuit will ensure the independence of the Oracle and that students have a voice in the direction the newspaper takes. “If you don’t have the student-run aspect and the independence, it’s very hard to have a strong journalism program. If they’re worried about writing a story that offends somebody in power, that it’s going to affect the program, then it’s going to have a chilling effect,” Gomez said.
In a statement to the Student Press Law Center, Olson said that she joined the lawsuit to ensure the spirit of the Oracle carries on.
“This case matters to me because I want to ensure the long term stability and prosperity of my school’s journalism program,” Olson said, “and I want student journalists at my school to be empowered to stand by their rights to publish stories that need to be told.”
Two student journalists and the former adviser for a California high school sued the district and administrators on Feb. 22, 2024, alleging that the principal intimidated and retaliated against them over an article on sexual harassment at the school.
",None,None,None,None,False,24CV431640,['ONGOING'],Civil,None,False,None,None,None,False,False,None,None,None,None,False,None,None,None,None,None,None,None,None,False,[],,student journalism,,, 2023-11-28 14:01:18.624780+00:00,2024-03-14 16:18:27.388432+00:00,Student journalist reports being pushed while filming Princeton protest,https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/student-journalist-reports-being-pushed-while-filming-princeton-protest/,2024-03-14 16:18:27.307061+00:00,,,,Assault,,,,Alexandra Orbuch (The Princeton Tory),,2023-11-09,False,Princeton,New Jersey (NJ),40.34872,-74.65905,"Student journalist Alexandra Orbuch said she was pushed and stepped on by a fellow student while documenting a pro-Palestinian protest at Princeton University in New Jersey on Nov. 9, 2023.
Orbuch wrote on social media that she was covering a student-led “Walkout for Palestine” in her capacity as a reporter for The Princeton Tory. Orbuch also serves as its editor-in-chief and has authored multiple news articles on antisemitism and op-eds in support of Israel and Zionism.
“I stood at a distance, gathering footage and audio of the protestors, but protesters continued to stalk and harass me,” she wrote. Footage from the incident shows participants deliberately using signs and flags to block Orbuch’s camera.
As the event continued, Orbuch wrote that one individual became emboldened and ultimately pushed her and stepped on her foot.
I repeatedly told him that his level of closeness made me extremely uncomfortable, and I attempted to move away a number of times. He refused to leave me alone. It escalated to the point that he pushed me and stepped on my foot. Free speech is one thing. Assault is another. pic.twitter.com/YA3HyVdrgB
— Alexandra Orbuch (@OrbuchA) November 10, 2023
The Princeton Committee on Palestine posted a statement to social media claiming that the protester that Orbuch publicly identified had kept a respectful distance and that Orbuch ran into him, then baselessly accused him of assault.
Orbuch did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
While covering the Southeastern Conference Tournament in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 10, 2023, student photojournalist Jack Weaver’s coverage of men’s basketball was abruptly interrupted by a University of Arkansas staff member following the university’s loss.
Weaver told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that he was on assignment for the Kentucky Kernel, the student newspaper of the University of Kentucky. He went onto the court after the Arkansas-Texas A&M game to photograph the player and coach reactions, as he had done with previous games.
“As [Arkansas coach Eric Musselman] started making his way toward the tunnel, I took out my phone to grab a video of the team coming off the court. And that did not go as planned,” he said.
Weaver said that just as he began filming, Arkansas’ Director of Internal Operations Riley Hall grabbed the phone out of his hand and threw it.
Arkansas head coach Eric Musselman left the court in a rage of f-bombs after losing to Texas A&M in the #SECMBB Tournament. His assistant then grabbed my phone and threw it at the ground. @KYKernelSports pic.twitter.com/xRiX7O7dAN
— Jack Weaver (@jack_weaver_) March 11, 2023
Weaver said that the three-second clip he posted to Twitter was all that his phone captured before it hit the ground and stopped recording, but that the phone was not damaged.
“I was wearing my press credentials, I had my camera around my neck and I was standing completely to the side by the rail with plenty of room to move there. I wasn’t in anyone’s way and was in an approved area,” Weaver said.
“Obviously I’m fine, all he did was grab my phone and toss it. It’s not like he pushed me or broke my camera,” he said. “But still, nonetheless, you can’t do that. And I think people kind of understand that that’s not acceptable.”
Weaver said the newsroom as well as professors at the university have been supportive. In a statement on Twitter, The Kernel said it was appalled by the incident.
“Jack Weaver always embodies professionalism on the job and no journalist, especially a student journalist, should be subjected to violence for simply doing their job,” the statement read.
Hunter Yurachek, the vice chancellor and director of athletics at the University of Arkansas, posted a statement on Twitter the following day apologizing for the incident, which he characterized as accidental.
“Mr. Hall expressed his regret that while leaving the floor his engagement inadvertently resulted in knocking the reporter’s cell phone from his hand,” Yurachek wrote. “While, based on our discussion, I do not believe there was malicious intent, I have addressed the issue with Mr. Hall and he agrees his actions were not appropriate or reflective of our program.”
Weaver told the Tracker that Hall also called him to apologize, reiterating that it had been unintentional. Weaver said that when he challenged that claim, Hall simply repeated that he was sorry and that it was an accident.
A member of the University of Arkansas coaching staff sports Razorbacks sneakers during the SEC Tournament on March 10, 2023.
",None,None,None,None,False,None,[],None,None,False,None,None,None,False,False,None,None,None,None,False,None,[],None,None,None,None,None,None,False,[],,student journalism,,, 2022-09-19 20:31:03.727845+00:00,2024-02-29 15:11:45.503801+00:00,"California journalism adviser threatened with suspension, rescinded after appeal",https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/california-journalism-advisor-threatened-with-suspension-rescinded-after-appeal/,2024-02-29 15:11:45.338455+00:00,,,,Other Incident,,,,,,2022-09-01,False,Lake Balboa,California (CA),None,None,"The suspension of a journalism adviser at a high school in Lake Balboa, California, was rescinded on Sept. 16, 2022 following a lengthy conflict with school administrators.
Daniel Pearl Magnet High School’s journalism adviser, Adriana Chavira, was given an unpaid three-day suspension on Sept. 1, after Chavira repeatedly denied school administrators' requests that she remove a librarian’s name from a fall 2021 student story about a vaccine mandate protest, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Chavira, a former reporter and longtime journalism adviser at the high school, told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that she left the name in the story because the student journalists didn’t want it removed.
“It’s a student-run publication,” Chavira said. “I read the stories before they’re posted, but the students are the ones who ultimately write the headlines, post them and make it live. I don’t do that.”
The original report about people protesting the school district’s vaccination mandate was published in November 2021. The article named a librarian who had refused to be vaccinated and left the school because of the mandate, causing the school library to close.
Chavira said she received an email from the librarian in mid-November asking that her name be taken out of the story. Chavira forwarded the email to the Pearl Post’s student journalists, who consulted with the Student Press Law Center and decided not to remove the name given its newsworthiness.
Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel for the SPLC, said that California has the oldest law protecting students’ First Amendment rights in the country. The law, Education Code 48907, also protects journalism advisers from retaliation.
“It’s such an easy legal case,” Hiestand said. “And I really am befuddled by why the district has taken the stance that it has.”
In a statement emailed to the Tracker before the suspension was rescinded, a Los Angeles Unified School District spokesperson said they were unable to address ongoing personnel matters. “We will continue to support our students and their journalistic endeavors at Daniel Pearl Magnet High School while also respecting the concerns of our school community.”
Chavira said she received her first email from school administrators threatening disciplinary action if the name wasn’t taken out of the story in January 2022. In a months-long back-and-forth, she said, the school would repeatedly give her deadlines to remove the name. She repeatedly ignored them, arguing that it was up to the students’ discretion.
The suspension, which Chavira said would have been handed down in June 2022 if the school’s principal hadn't fallen ill at the end of the school year, came three weeks into the fall 2022 semester. According to Chavira, the school completely ignored the law protecting the student publication and framed the suspension as an issue of insubordination.
Backed by the California Teachers Association, journalists and press freedom advocates around the country, Chavira’s suspension was rescinded following an appeal hearing on Sept. 16, the Times reported. Supporters also include the father of Daniel Pearl, the slain reporter after whom the school is named. In an LA Press Club statement, Judea Pearl, who is also the president of his son’s namesake foundation, praised the journalism adviser for inspiring her students.
In her tweet celebrating the successful appeal, Chavira thanked the many supporters.
🧵My suspension has been rescinded! You have no idea how relieved I am! I am grateful to the many journalism organizations & people who supported my students & me throughout this ordeal. Yes, I wore this #FirstAmendment shirt to my appeal meeting on Zoom today. (1/6) pic.twitter.com/TaSZPaUS7U
— Adriana Chavira (@adrianachavira) September 17, 2022
“The district should never have attempted to censor my students and discipline me,” Chavira wrote. “All along, I knew we were in the right and I'm proud of my students for holding their ground, too.”
A high school student newspaper and related class in Nebraska were shuttered by school administrators in May 2022, after student journalists featured LGBTQ content in their end-of-year issue, a move press freedom advocates condemned as censorship.
The Grand Island Independent reported that Northwest Public Schools administrators abruptly announced an end to The Viking Saga, a 54-year-old student publication in Grand Island, just three days after the newspaper published its June issue on May 16.
According to the Independent, which publishes the school newspaper, an email sent by a school employee to cancel printing services on May 22 said the news program was slashed because the school board and superintendent were “unhappy with the last issue's editorial content.”
The Saga adviser declined to comment to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. The student journalists told the Independent that Saga staff had been reprimanded in April by district officials who said to use only birth names in bylines and articles.
Marcus Pennell, a college freshman and former Saga student journalist, wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post that the Saga staff decided to highlight LGBTQ issues after the reprimand.
“The Saga’s staff disagreed with the policy,” Pennell wrote. “So with our next issue, we knew we wanted to make a statement.”
The June issue’s LGBTQ content, according to Pennell, was three articles and, next to the paper’s nameplate, two rainbow icons.
“Every other story in the paper was dedicated to honoring Northwest’s expansive student life.”
Saga student journalists reached out to the Student Press Law Center, which condemned the censorship and worked with the students. Mike Hiestand, SPLC senior legal counsel, told the Tracker that this incident is part of a recent string of attacks on student journalism.
“The very first question I have to ask when a student journalist calls is ‘Where are you calling from?’ because it makes all of the difference in the world right now,” Hiestand said. “It’s really unfortunate, but the law does vary significantly from state-to-state.”
Laws that specifically protect students’ First Amendment rights, known as “New Voices” laws, are the best protection for student journalists, Hiestand said. New Voices legislation was introduced in Nebraska in 2019, but did not pass.
On Aug. 29, the ACLU of Nebraska issued a letter to district superintendent Jeff Edwards, calling the elimination of the Saga an infringement on the student’s constitutional rights and demanding the newspaper’s reinstatement.
Edwards wrote in an Aug. 31 statement that the Saga was temporarily paused, not canceled, and that the decision wasn’t based on a single reason. Neither the superintendent nor the school principal responded to a request for comment by the Tracker.
Since 2017, the Tracker has documented seven high school newspapers censored or subjected to prior review for their coverage of controversial topics.
If not reinstated, the 2022-2023 school year will mark the first time that the Saga hasn’t published since its 1968 launch. Last academic year, the student publication finished third at the Nebraska School Activities Association State Journalism Championship.
Journalist Fenit Nirappil was subpoenaed on April 22, 2021, in a lawsuit involving former Chicago police officers for documents related to his work on two stories for the Medill Innocence Project nearly a decade earlier, according to the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press.
Nirappil, now a journalist for The Washington Post, was a part of a team of Northwestern University students who investigated the conviction of former police officer Ariel Gomez during the 2011-2012 academic year, according to RCFP, which is representing Nirappil. RCFP is a partner of the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.
The subpoena was issued by Chicago-based Sotos Law Firm on behalf of four law enforcement officers and officials who are defendants in a federal lawsuit Gomez is pursuing alleging misconduct related to his conviction.
The officers’ legal team sought a broad range of documents from Nirappil related to his undergraduate education, according to a letter RCFP senior attorney Sarah Matthews wrote in response to the subpoena. Matthews is a member of the Tracker’s advisory committee.
Matthews argued in the letter that Nirappil isn’t required to comply with the subpoena, citing First Amendment privilege for journalists.
She also wrote that the subpoena was invalid due to procedural rules. It was improperly served because it was sent through the mail, rather than personally served, she wrote.
The subpoena was also overly broad, including requests for records related to 49 individuals, according to the letter. Matthews wrote that it effectively sought all information related to Nirappil’s undergraduate education.
The subpoena requested Nirappil’s documents by May 5 — an “insufficient” amount of time to reply given the scope of the request, and that he only received the subpoena on May 1, Matthews wrote.
Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, if the subject of a subpoena for documents files an objection within a certain window of time, they don’t need to comply with the subpoena, according to Matthews.
She told the Tracker Nirappil wasn’t under any further obligation to respond, unless the attorneys representing the Chicago police officers file a motion in court.
Nirappil didn’t respond to a request for comment. He posted on Twitter about the subpoena on May 10.
“I'm not going to roll over when attorneys for law enforcement come after my reporting notes, even if they were from college a decade ago,” he wrote.
I'm not going to roll over when attorneys for law enforcement come after my reporting notes, even if they were from college a decade ago. Thank you for helping me fight this, @rcfp https://t.co/rF7d7MM3y8
— Fenit Nirappil (@FenitN) May 10, 2021
Sotos Law Firm also didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Estelle Timar-Wilcox, news editor for the Macalester College student news site The Mac Weekly, was shoved by a Minnesota State Patrol trooper while covering a protest in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, on April 16, 2021, she told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.
The fatal police shooting of 20-year-old Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center on April 11 rekindled a wave of racial justice protests that began almost a year earlier. Wright’s death occurred as a former police officer in nearby Minneapolis was on trial in the death of George Floyd. Protests began outside the Brooklyn Center Police Department the day Wright was killed and continued daily through mid-April.
According to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the April 16 protest had been peaceful until around 9 p.m., when, authorities told the outlet, some in the crowd began to throw objects and attempt to break through a barrier around the police station, prompting the declaration of an unlawful assembly and orders for dispersal. At around 10 p.m., according to Minnesota Public Radio, police moved swiftly to corral the protesters and members of the press, deploying flash-bang grenades and pepper spray.
Timar-Wilcox told the Tracker that she was reporting on the protest that night outside the police station with three other student journalists from the Mac Weekly.
She said they heard police make the unlawful assembly announcement and that about 15 minutes later a line of law enforcement officers came in from many directions to form a “kettle,” a crowd-control tactic in which officers block people from leaving.
Timar-Wilcox said she was standing by an apartment building near the police station with her fellow student journalists and other members of the media, taking photographs and reporting as officers moved up the street. She said that they were on the outside of the kettle.
After the first line of law enforcement officers passed by, she said, a line of Minnesota State Patrol troopers started to come up the street, asking journalists to move back. Timar-Wilcox said she had already backed up and was against the apartment building, but one trooper on the edge of the line tried to get her to move farther back, she said, and shoved her to the ground.
Video Timar-Wilcox recorded of the incident, reviewed by the Tracker, shows many MSP troopers moving past the camera. Voices can be heard saying, “Media, back up,” and “Keep going.”
One voice shouts, “Back up!” The video shakes and the screen briefly goes black, then is angled upward, catching part of a trooper’s bright yellow uniform.
This was the moment the trooper shoved her and she fell to the ground, according to Timar-Wilcox. She said she does not remember specifically where the trooper touched her but believes it was her shoulder or arm.
She said she was not injured. Another journalist helped her get back on her feet and she continued reporting, she said.
A short time after she was shoved, she said, law enforcement directed her and other journalists nearby to stand on a street corner and told them they could not move any closer to the kettle.
Timar-Wilcox said she was wearing a lanyard with her press pass issued by the Mac Weekly, which clearly states “press.” She said she does not believe that she was targeted because she was a journalist.
MSP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documents incidents of journalists being assaulted, arrested, struck by crowd-control ammunition or tear gas, or who had their equipment damaged in the course of reporting. Find all incidents related to Black Lives Matter and anti-police brutality protests here.
Kori Suzuki, media editor for The Mac Weekly, the student news site of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, was hit with a crowd-control munition while covering a protest in Brooklyn Center on April 14, 2021, he told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.
The fatal police shooting of 20-year-old Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center on April 11 rekindled a wave of racial justice protests that began almost a year earlier. Wright’s death occurred as a former police officer in nearby Minneapolis was on trial in the death of George Floyd. Protests began outside the Brooklyn Center Police Department the day Wright was killed and continued daily in the city through mid-April.
Suzuki told the Tracker he was covering an evening protest April 14 near the police station with a small group of other student journalists from Macalester College. Some time after it began, he said, the police response to the protest escalated, as law enforcement used chemical agents and crowd-control projectiles on demonstrators.
Suzuki said he was standing with a cluster of five or six journalists next to fencing erected around the police station. Law enforcement officers were directly on the other side of the barrier, he said, shooting pepper balls and other projectiles into the crowd through the fence.
As he was standing there, Suzuki said, a projectile hit one of his legs.
Suzuki tweeted a photograph of the projectile at 10:06 p.m. He wrote that the base was plastic and the tip was foam.
One of the munitions that clipped me. Foam tip, base feels like plastic @themacweekly pic.twitter.com/MqflNVnej6
— Kori Suzuki (@korisuzuk1) April 15, 2021
He told the Tracker he was not injured by the impact of the projectile and did not believe he was deliberately targeted. He said he thought the projectile likely ricocheted off of something else before it hit him, and he could not recall which leg it hit.
Suzuki said he was displaying a press badge issued by The Mac Weekly that has his photograph, name, and says “PRESS.”
Multiple law enforcement agencies were involved with the response to protests in Brooklyn Center. Suzuki said he believes the Brooklyn Center Police Department was deploying projectiles that night.
BCPD did not respond to a request for comment.
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documents journalists assaulted, arrested, struck by crowd control ammunition or tear gas or who had their equipment damaged in the course of reporting. Find all incidents related to Black Lives Matter and anti-police brutality protests here.
Student journalist Emily Holshouser was one of at least four journalists detained while covering election-related protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement in Los Angeles, California, on Nov. 4, 2020.
Holshouser, who writes for California State University Northridge’s student publication The Daily Sundial, tweeted that she was covering a protest scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. outside City Hall in downtown LA.
When the event dispersed at 6:30 p.m., Holshouser followed a small group of remaining demonstrators as they walked south down Spring Street toward Pershing Square. By 7 p.m., the approximately 40 to 50 people who remained had stopped at the intersection of West 5th and South Hill streets, according to a tweet posted by Holshouser.
Holshouser tweeted just before 7:30 p.m. that Los Angeles police officers had arrived and declared that the gathering was an unlawful assembly.
Multiple journalists present at the protest reported that officers then hemmed in everyone present using a police tactic called kettling, and announced that everyone was under arrest.
Two videographers — Vishal Singh and Sean Beckner-Carmitchel — were placed under arrest for failure to disperse.
After being threatened with arrest, Holshouser tweeted that she and other members of the press were directed to a media staging area approximately 20 minutes later.
Arrests are being made. Media has been given a staging area. They say if we leave the curb, we are subject to arrest. pic.twitter.com/8aqmEKv5dC
— Emily Holshouser (@emilyytayylor) November 5, 2020
The Tracker has documented the detentions of all the journalists confirmed to have been present in the kettle here.
An independent journalist, @desertborder, tweeted at 8:05 p.m. that the LAPD officers had opened the kettle and released the remaining members of the press and demonstrators who had been detained.
By just after 8:30 p.m., Holshouser posted, “It’s all over. Cops have left, reporters have left, I’m headed home.”
When asked for comment about the arrests, Los Angeles Police Department spokesperson Capt. Stacy Spell confirmed to the Los Angeles Times that two individuals had been arrested and cited for failure to disperse. She also claimed that LAPD officers have been dealing with large, disruptive crowds that all subsequently claim to be members of the press.
“We are having an ongoing challenge with individuals who are participating in disruptive activities, taking over the street and failing to disperse but subsequently claiming to be media,” Spell said. “Literally the entire crowd claimed to be media.”
The LAPD did not respond to an emailed request for further comment.
Two journalists were hit with crowd-control munitions fired by law enforcement while documenting celebrations in Los Angeles, California, after the Dodgers won the World Series on Oct. 27, 2020.
Los Angeles and cities across the U.S. experienced protests against police brutality throughout the summer, and crowds in L.A. had clashed with police earlier in October during celebrations of the Lakers’ NBA championship win. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker is documenting assaults, arrests and other incidents involving journalists covering protests across the country.
Beverly Hills Courier reporter Samuel Braslow told the Tracker he was covering the downtown celebration with Emily Holshouser, a reporter for California State University Northridge’s student newspaper, The Daily Sundial. Holshouser declined to comment.
The Los Angeles Times reported that celebrations devolved into looting and vandalism in downtown L.A. and the neighborhood of Echo Park.
Holshouser reported on Twitter that one policeman told her there were “not enough” officers to deal with the crowd.
Braslow told the Tracker, “Police were trying to respond to things, but again, they were spread thin.”
On her Twitter feed, Holshouser said that the LAPD issued a dispersal order shortly after 10 p.m., and that a line of officers in riot gear and mounted police were preparing to advance.
Braslow said he and Holshouser were standing with a group of 10-15 people at a street corner when police began advancing toward them. Shortly before midnight, Holshouser posted a clip of nearly a dozen individuals wearing Dodgers-branded apparel posing for Braslow to take a photo.
“These guys made @SamBraslow photograph them and then we got shot at with foam baton rounds,” Holshouser wrote. “I got shot in my hip. I’m fine just mega pissed.”
These guys made @SamBraslow photograph them and then we got shot at with foam baton rounds ✨ I got shot in my hip. I’m fine just mega pissed pic.twitter.com/OPH0By53bU
— Emily Holshouser (@emilyytayylor) October 28, 2020
Braslow tweeted an image of a canister for a foam baton round — a crowd-control munition similar to a rubber bullet — at 11:54 p.m., and wrote that he had been hit in the arm by a “less-lethal” round. He told the Tracker he was not certain what type of munition struck him. The Tracker has documented Braslow’s assault here.
“I’m fine, just noting it,” Braslow wrote. “As per usual, camera around my neck, carrying camera bag, and wearing press credentials.”
Braslow told the Tracker he was also wearing a bulletproof vest and ballistic goggles. Holshouser can be seen in clips from that night wearing a bright yellow vest and press pass.
Braslow said he had some bruising and soreness on his arm, but both he and Holshouser were able to continue reporting that night.
The Los Angeles Police Department did not respond to emailed requests for comment as of press time.
A third journalist, L.A. Taco reporter Lexis-Olivier Ray, was tackled to the ground and struck with batons while filming the celebrations shortly after midnight. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker has documented that assault here.
Student journalist Abel Reyes was confronted and harassed by a group of individuals who demanded that he delete all the photos he had taken while documenting protesters in Long Beach, California, on Sept. 14, 2021.
Reyes told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker a counterprotest was organized in opposition to a rally with President Joe Biden and Gov. Gavin Newsom at Long Beach City College. He said he was leaving an area with a lot of people he identified as supporters of former President Donald Trump when the harassment began.
“It started with a lady who noticed my camera and the press badge around my neck, and she started asking me a bunch of questions, whether I was part of the ‘fake news,’ where I was from,” Reyes said.
The student journalist said he tried to walk away, but the woman followed him and continued yelling at him, telling him to take off his “China mask,” in reference to the face mask he was wearing as a coronavirus safety measure.
Suddenly, Reyes said, a group of men surrounded him. One of the men demanded that Reyes show him the photos he had taken. Reyes said he explained that he had taken close to 400 photos and that he couldn’t show the man all of them. The man then told Reyes to delete all of his images.
“I didn’t argue, I didn’t want to argue, I didn’t say anything. At that point I just wanted to leave because it was not a good situation,” Reyes said, adding that he felt they wouldn’t let him leave until he complied with their demands.
According to Reyes’ Instagram post that night, once the group was convinced he had deleted all of the images one of them told him, “You’re lucky we’re nice.”
Reyes left the protest shortly after without attempting to take any additional photos, and told the Tracker that he has avoided any demonstrations with counterprotesters since the incident.
As a young journalist himself, he is particularly upset by the impact of harassment on student journalists.
“I worry about what ripple effects this is having on journalism as a whole,” Reyes said. “How do you expect someone to go into journalism if they can’t even get through student journalism without something like this happening?”
Abel Reyes, center with camera, documents an August demonstration in Fullerton, California. Reyes was harassed by a group of people who insisted he delete photos off his camera.
",None,None,None,None,False,None,[],None,None,False,private individual,None,None,False,False,None,None,None,None,False,None,[],None,None,None,None,None,None,False,None,,"Donald Trump, Joe Biden rally, protest, student journalism",,, 2020-12-01 21:09:18.138672+00:00,2024-02-29 17:35:07.516417+00:00,"Student photojournalist arrested, equipment seized during LA protest",https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/student-photojournalist-arrested-equipment-seized-during-l-protest/,2024-02-29 17:35:07.366429+00:00,rioting: failure to disperse (charges dropped as of 2021-03-01),LegalOrder object (238),"(2021-03-01 19:07:00+00:00) Charges dropped against LA student photojournalist; some equipment still not returned, (2022-09-18 13:57:00+00:00) LA photojournalist receives $90,000 settlement in lawsuit against the county, sheriff’s department, (2023-05-18 16:08:00+00:00) Photojournalist’s phone searched after arrest, warrant confirms, (2021-10-22 00:00:00+00:00) LA student photojournalist sues the county, sheriff’s department following arrest and loss of equipment","Arrest/Criminal Charge, Assault, Equipment Search or Seizure, Subpoena/Legal Order",,"camera: count of 1, cellphone: count of 1, storage device: count of 1",,Pablo Unzueta (Daily Forty-Niner),,2020-09-08,False,Los Angeles,California (CA),34.05223,-118.24368,"Pablo Unzueta, a freelance photojournalist and video editor for California State University, Long Beach’s newspaper, the Daily Forty-Niner, was arrested while documenting protests in the South Los Angeles area on Sept. 8, 2020.
Unzueta told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker he was following a group of protesters as they gathered for the fourth consecutive night outside the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department following the fatal shooting of Dijon Kizzee, a Black man, by deputies on Aug. 31.
At approximately 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 8, Unzueta said, deputies declared the protest unlawful and ordered the crowd to disperse. Following the order, Unzueta said he saw deputies firing tear gas and flash-bang grenades into the crowd around the intersection of Normandie Avenue and West Imperial Highway.
Unzueta said officers pushed the crowd north on Normandie as they advanced, and that many of the protesters began splitting off and dispersing.
“I didn’t know the area that well so I made a left into this neighborhood on this very narrow street,” Unzueta said. “The sheriffs would get on the trucks and then the truck would speed up through the street and then they would start firing more [flash-bang grenades] and then more tear gas.”
“I kept ducking behind cars while I’m running so I wouldn’t get hit.”
Unzueta said a few minutes passed as he kept looking for a way to get back to his car, which was parked near the Sheriff’s Department, but realized that he was stuck on a long, narrow block.
Two sheriff’s vehicles pulled up at approximately 9:30 p.m., Unzueta said, and deputies began arresting the demonstrators that remained.
“This was sort of a ‘holy shit’ moment for me, and I immediately identified myself as press just to avoid getting tackled or being shot with a rubber bullet,” Unzueta said.
He said that after a couple of deputies saw his credentials and camera and didn’t stop him, he thought he would be allowed to leave and began to head back the way they had come to return to his vehicle.
“I start walking on the sidewalk and that’s when an officer from up above in the truck said, ‘Hey! Grab that guy!,’” Unzueta said. “Again I yelled, ‘Press, press, press!’ And that’s when the officer...just grabbed me, threw my camera on the ground and ripped my backpack off my back.”
Unzueta told the Tracker he was wearing press credentials from Mt. San Antonio College, where Unzueta used to be a student, and his College Media Association badge, and repeatedly told the deputies to call the newspaper’s adviser.
During the course of his arrest, Unzueta said that officers tightened his metal handcuffs so tightly that he lost all feeling in his hands, and that they called him demeaning names and slurs. Unzueta said deputies then pushed him into the back of a department van, causing him to fall on and rupture multiple pepper balls. The officers left him to struggle to breathe amid clouds of pepper powder, he said.
Unzueta also alleges that some of the officers used their personal cellphones to photograph him and other detainees.
“The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department values the media and highly respects the freedom of the press,” Department spokesperson Deputy Trina Schrader told the Tracker in an emailed statement. “Please be aware an administrative investigation has been launched into the circumstances surrounding this incident. A lieutenant from South Los Angeles Station has been assigned and will be contacting Mr. Unzueta to investigate these allegations.”
Unzueta said deputies seized his iPhone and Nikon D800 camera. He said he was handcuffed for about two hours. He was transported to the South Los Angeles Sheriff’s Station where he was booked at 10:30 p.m., and then transferred to the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown Los Angeles.
Unzueta estimated he was in police custody for 10 or 11 hours. His booking data, reviewed by the Tracker, shows he was released the following day with a citation. A copy of the citation shared with the Tracker shows Unzueta was arrested for unlawful assembly, a misdemeanor, and was ordered to appear in court two days later.
Unzueta said his equipment and cellphone weren’t returned to him upon his release.
The Student Press Law Center, a Tracker partner organization, connected Unzueta with the Criminal Justice Clinic at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. LAist, part of Southern California Public Radio, reported that the clinic was able to secure the release of Unzueta’s camera, but the memory card — which Unzueta told the Tracker contained two years worth of freelance work — had been removed.
Unzueta said deputies first claimed that the camera hadn’t contained an SD card and then that it may have fallen out when the deputy threw it to the ground during the arrest. Unzueta disputed both of these assertions, and said the design of the camera makes it nearly impossible for the memory card to fall out.
In a letter sent on Unzueta’s behalf, the clinic asked that the cellphone and memory card be returned and for assurance that the case wouldn’t be presented to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office for prosecution, a copy of his arrest report and an apology from the department.
“Sheriff’s deputies had no basis to arrest Mr. Unzueta,” the letter reads. “A truck full of deputies passed by, and a deputy pointed at Mr. Unzueta and said, ‘Get him.’ Mr. Unzueta repeatedly identified himself as a member of the press and as a student journalist, displaying his student press badge, but the deputy who arrested him ignored him.”
Unzueta confirmed to the Tracker that he still hasn’t regained complete feeling in his palms more than two and a half months later, attributing the numbness to the overly tight handcuffs.
The Long Beach Press Telegram reported on Nov. 17 that the department hadn’t responded to the letter, according to one of Unzueta’s lawyers.
“I’ve been photographing protests since the Trayvon Martin protest, which was in 2013 and I was 17 at the time. I’ve been doing this a long time, and I never thought I’d have to experience something like I experienced on September 8th,” Unzueta said.
Unzueta told the Long Beach Post that while he has always had a passion for photography, he was shaken by the incident.
“I don’t feel safe going out anymore,” Unzueta said. “This is the last thing I want to do.”
Andrew Ringle, the executive editor of the Commonwealth Times, the independent student newspaper of Virginia Commonwealth University, was detained by police while covering a protest against police violence in Richmond, Virginia, on July 26, 2020.
Ringle told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker in a phone interview that he and his news editor, Eduardo Acevedo, had heard about the protest in Richmond’s Monroe Park after seeing a flyer online. Richmond Police Chief Gerald Smith would later describe the flyer as using the “same tone, same intimidation, same wanting to produce fear into the city of Richmond, and calling for a repeat of Saturday night,” which had be notably violent.
Ringle said that, while several hundred showed up on July 25, very few people were in attendance the following night, and as such, he and Acevedo decided to leave the area, anticipating that the protest would peter out within half an hour. But just past 10 p.m., as they were walking out of the park, which had technically been closed as of sundown, the police showed up. The Daily Progress, a paper based in Charlottesville, reported the police presence at the park was 100 officers, responding to a protest of 50 people.
Ringle told the Tracker that the officers organized into a line and proceeded to arrest every individual in the park related to the protests. Another reporter at the park that night, NBC12 reporter Olivia Ugino, tweeted that she had been told by the police to move or get arrested.
Ringle said that he and Acevedo had made it to the sidewalk circling the park when they heard, “Get ’em!” According to Ringle, police then rushed toward the two journalists. Acevedo sprinted across the street, while Ringle was put into handcuffs.
Acevedo started to livestream the detainment, in which he can be heard screaming at officers that Ringle was a member of the press.
Ringle explained to the Tracker that the first words out of his mouth once he was in handcuffs were “I’m not resisting,” but the officers responded by shouting, “Stop resisting!” Ringle said he understood this as an attempt to escalate the situation. The arresting officer, Ringle said, made Ringle say his name back to him because he suggested Ringle “was getting too excited or acting crazy.”
Ringle tweeted afterward that officers first checked his Capital News Service-issued press badge, but did not initially accept it as enough proof that he was not a protester. Officers then searched his wallet for a driver’s license, which he did not have.
Officers checked my state press ID, then searched my wallet for a drivers license (which I did not have) and finally demanded I say my SSN (twice). I told them I was there to work, not to protest, and that I was trying to leave. They said city parks are closed after dark.
— Andrew Ringle (@aeringle) July 27, 2020
“They asked for a lot of personal information that I was not comfortable giving, but then they mentioned that there were paddy wagons on the way and that they were going to start taking people to the jail,” Ringle told the Tracker.
Ringle said he then gave the arresting officer his Social Security number, which was relayed over the radio to confirm his identity. Ringle believes that the officers also checked his press badge on an online database to confirm his identity. After 25 minutes, Ringle said, he was released and admonished for not knowing of the park’s closure.
Police Chief Smith referenced Ringle’s detainment in the next day’s press conference, stating, “In tense situations like this ... we have to look at individuals who claim to be members of the press, and we have to look at them very carefully … For those who claim to be the media, you must abide by the laws just as well. If you are in a location that you are not supposed to be in, you can be held accountable for that as well.” Smith also stated that he thought that the protesters knew they were trespassing, because they started moving out of the park when the police came.
According to the Daily Progress, six people were charged that night with trespassing. The Richmond Bail Fund counted 10 arrests in the park. The Richmond Police Department did not respond to the Tracker’s requests for comment on Ringle’s detainment.
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker is documenting several hundred incidents of journalists being assaulted, arrested, struck by crowd control ammunition or tear gas or having their equipment damaged while covering Black Lives Matter protests across the country. Find these incidents here.
Eduardo Acevedo, news editor for The Commonwealth Times, an independent newspaper run by Virginia Commonwealth University students, said he was detained by police while covering a protest in Richmond, Virginia, the night of July 25, 2020.
Protests against racial inequality and police brutality were held in Richmond throughout the summer in response to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black people at the hands of police.
Acevedo told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that he and two colleagues from the Commonwealth Times were covering a protest outside of the Richmond Police Headquarters, where police had formed a riot shield wall and declared the demonstration an “unlawful assembly.” According to Acevedo, someone in the crowd threw a flaming object into a Humvee that had been parked to block protesters. Acevedo said police responded by firing tear gas and flash-bang grenade canisters.
At that point, Acevedo said, he became separated from his Commonwealth Times colleagues. He said he was disoriented and “running blind” because of the tear gas. A journalist from another Virginia paper, Sabrina Moreno of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, helped him around the corner of a building and began pouring milk in his eyes to help him recover from the gas, he said.
Acevedo said a group of at least five police officers came around the corner of the building and suddenly moved in to restrain the two journalists. Video posted on Twitter by activist Jimmie Lee Jarvis shows officers swarm Acevedo and Moreno while they can be heard screaming, “We’re press.” Officers pushed Acevedo face down on the ground, despite his shouts identifying himself as a journalist. Moreno's detainment is documented here.
After he had shouted his identity at least a dozen times, the officers released Acevedo, the journalist said. When Acevedo stood up, he said he was feeling claustrophobic from the lingering effects of the tear gas and the officers in riot gear crowded around him, so he asked an officer to give him some more space. The officer responded “no” close to his face, he said.
Police let Acevedo go after he showed them his press badge identifying him with his photo as working with The Commonwealth Times, he said. Acevedo said he was released less than 10 minutes after police first restrained him.
Acevedo said he has not communicated with the Richmond Police Department about the incident. However, his experience was one of several incidents referenced in a Sept. 1, 2020 letter to Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney and the chief of the Richmond Police Department from the Student Press Law Center and other press freedom groups raising concerns about police treatment of journalists during protests.
In an email responding to the Tracker’s request for comment, a police spokesperson wrote: “The Richmond Police Department has a long history working with our media partners and will continue to do so, with the common goal of public safety in mind.” The spokesperson asked if Acevedo had filed a complaint; told that he had not, the spokesperson said a formal complaint would have given police more details about the incident, but that in general, members of the media are not exempt from a declaration of unlawful assembly.
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker is documenting several hundred incidents of journalists being assaulted, arrested, struck by crowd control ammunition or tear gas, or having their equipment damaged while covering these protests across the country. Find these incidents here.
This article has been updated to include the identity of the second journalist detained.
Eddy Binford-Ross, a 17-year-old student journalist, said federal agents threw a stun grenade and tear gas canister at her on July 19, 2020, while she was covering protests in Portland, Oregon.
Binford-Ross, editor in chief at her high school student newspaper in Salem, Oregon, was covering one of the many protests that had broken out across the U.S. in response to police violence and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement after the May 25 death of George Floyd. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker is documenting assaults, arrests and other incidents involving journalists covering protests across the country.
July 19 marked the 53rd day of protests in Portland, Binford-Ross reported in her school paper, The Clypian. The protests had grown more intense with the arrival of federal law enforcement in early July. A temporary restraining order on July 2 that barred the Portland police from harming or impeding journalists wasn’t expanded to include federal agents until July 23. Binford-Ross is a plaintiff in the class action suit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Oregon.
The mood at the demonstrations had felt positive at the start of the night, Binford-Ross told the Tracker. She was covering the second night of protests by the “Wall of Moms” outside the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse downtown, a nightly flashpoint for confrontations between protesters and federal agents.
Just before 10 p.m., law enforcement issued a warning to protesters who had been attempting to dismantle the fence around the courthouse, which the federal government considered crucial to its presence, according to a document obtained by Oregon Public Broadcasting. When the moms formed a barrier between protesters and the fence to de-escalate tensions, federal officers rushed out of the courthouse and pointed guns at protesters from the other side of the fence.
It was just before midnight when the stun grenade was thrown towards Binford-Ross, she said. After some protesters had taken down parts of the fence, agents deployed stun grenades and tear gas to push protesters back into the street. Binford-Ross had already begun to retreat into Chapman Square and was away from most protesters when the multi-port stun grenade landed near her. When she tried to move away, an agent threw a tear gas canister in her path.
“It was really inhumane,” Binford-Ross said. “It would be one thing if I was running towards officers, but I was running away from them, I was trying to get away from that situation.”
Her mother, Warren Binford, accompanied her and tweeted a video of the moment the stun grenade exploded. “The US #BorderPatrol threw this stun grenade at me & my minor daughter, both US citizens, while she was covering this local story,” her mother wrote.
The US #BorderPatrol threw this stun grenade at me & my minor daughter, both US citizens, while she was covering this local story again last night about the #Feds in #Portland for her high school newspaper @Clypian. This was the 2nd time in 3 days the Feds have thrown.... pic.twitter.com/IBh0n73tzJ
— Warren Binford (@childrightsprof) July 20, 2020
Another tweet shows the stun grenade marked “BORTAC,” which is an acronym for the U.S. Border Patrol Tactical Unit.
In addition to having press identification, Binford-Ross had added additional press markings since being targeted with crowd-control munitions the day before, including a helmet marked “press” on all four sides and pants with “press” written with reflective tape spelling down the leg
While she’d felt more prepared to cover that night’s demonstrations since beginning her protest coverage in Portland two nights before, she still has moments when the odors of tear gas come to her at random times. “It definitely takes a mental and emotional toll,” said Binford-Ross, who covered more than 30 BLM protests in Portland and Salem for the school paper over the summer. Her tweets about the protests were used by ABC, Reuters, Yahoo News and other outlets.
The Department of Homeland Security, which has coordinated the federal presence in Portland, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Eddy Binford-Ross, a 17-year-old student journalist, said federal agents threw a flash-bang grenade toward her on July 18, 2020, while she was covering protests in Portland, Oregon.
Binford-Ross, editor in chief at her high school student newspaper in Salem, Oregon, said flash-bang grenades landed near her on two separate occasions that night — one before midnight on July 17 and one after — but only the second one seemed targeted at her. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, which documents assaults, arrests and other incidents involving journalists covering protests across the country in support of the Black Lives Matter movement after the May 25 death of George Floyd, considers a targeted crowd-control incident an assault.
The Portland protests, held nightly since late May, had grown more intense as the presence of federal law enforcement increased in early July. A temporary restraining order on July 2 that barred the Portland police from harming or impeding journalists wasn’t expanded to include federal agents until July 23. Binford-Ross is a plaintiff in the class action suit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Oregon.
July 17 was the first night Binford-Ross had covered the Portland protests since federal agents had been deployed to the city. The first flash-bang grenade incident occurred shortly after 10 p.m., she said.
Demonstrators had gathered around 7 p.m. at the Multnomah County Justice Center for a candlelight vigil. Binford-Ross was outside the Justice Center when federal agents started ordering people to move. “Anyone who stepped into the street [got] shot with their crowd-control munitions,” she told the Tracker.
Binford-Ross moved down a block, where she met two acquaintances from Salem who were livestreaming the events. They were half a block away from protesters when a federal agent threw the flash-bang grenade over the wall near her. “There wasn’t any warning or anything...it was like 10 feet away from us...it was a blinding shock,” Binford-Ross said, adding she was temporarily deafened.
The second flash-bang grenade was thrown sometime after 1:30 a.m., as federal agents were advancing on protesters in Chapman Square. Binford-Ross was standing off to the side away from the protesters, she said, wearing press identification around her neck and carrying a large camera.
As federal agents advanced on the crowd with guns drawn, one of them threw a flash-bang grenade towards her that exploded near her feet, stunning and deafening her again. “They shot right towards me...it came within 10 feet of me again,” Binford-Ross said.
She was recording at the time, and her mother, Warren Binford, posted the video on Twitter. “These are concussive devices & they targeted a child,” her mother wrote.
Our young daughter (a #studentjournalist) had this #flashbang shot at her by the #Feds & #portland police last night even though she was staying on the perimeter, wearing her press credentials & completely law abiding. These are concussive devices & they targeted a child. Shame! pic.twitter.com/DWUk2ef86H
— Warren Binford (@childrightsprof) July 18, 2020
The Department of Homeland Security, which has coordinated the federal presence in Portland, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“It doesn't seem like something that would happen in the U.S.,” Binford-Ross said. “It felt like something you would experience in a war zone, especially when the people who are shooting the munitions towards you are unidentifiable federal agents, from undisclosed federal agencies and they’re in camo, like soldiers.”
Binford-Ross, who covered more than 30 BLM protests in Portland and Salem for her school paper, The Clypian, over the summer, said she never planned on a career in journalism until she saw the value of reporting during this time. “It was a real lesson in perseverance and dedication and also personal safety,” said Binford-Ross, who said her tweets about the protests were used by ABC, Reuters, Yahoo News and other outlets.
A federal law enforcement officer fired a tear gas canister toward freelance journalist Justin Yau on July 15, 2020 in Portland, Oregon, striking him with two burning fragments.
Yau, a student at the University of Portland whose work has been featured by the Daily Mail and The New York Times, was covering one of the many protests that had broken out across the U.S. in response to police violence and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement after the May 25 death of George Floyd. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker is documenting assaults, arrests and other incidents involving journalists covering protests across the country.
The Portland protests, held nightly since late May, had grown more intense as the presence of federal law enforcement increased in early July. A temporary restraining order on July 2 that barred the Portland police from harming or impeding journalists wasn’t expanded to include federal agents until July 23. Yau provided a declaration in support of the suit and deferred additional comment to that declaration.
In the early hours of July 15, Yau was covering a protest outside the Multnomah County Justice Center and the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse downtown, according to his declaration. He was taking photographs with a Nikon camera and filming on his cellphone and gimbal. He was also clearly marked as press, with a neon reflective vest and helmet reading “press” in block letters as well as a press pass around his neck.
A few minutes before 4 a.m., Yau was filming and photographing protesters at the intersection of Southwest Third Avenue and Southwest Main Street as they were pushed north by federal agents, according to the court filing. He was standing about 40 feet from the protesters as federal agents fired on the crowd with flash-bang grenades, pepper balls and tear gas. Although Yau was covering the protest from a distance, a federal agent fired a tear gas canister directly at him, he said, striking him with burning fragments.
Independent journalist Garrison Davis captured part of the shooting in a video he posted on Twitter around 5 a.m.
Shortly after, Yau replied to Davis’ tweet with his own post, saying, “It was 2 pieces of burning fragments from the Teargas grenades that landed briefly on my arm and jeans. The burning pieces can be seen briefly on the ground.”
“I have covered protests in Hong Kong, where a totalitarian regime is suppressing protesters with brutal violence,” Yau said in the court filing. “Even Hong Kong police, however, were generally conscientious about differentiating between press and protesters.”
The Department of Homeland Security, which has coordinated the federal presence in Portland, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Journalist Andrew Ringle was pepper sprayed by a Richmond, Virginia, police officer and then thrown to the ground by another law enforcement official while he was covering protests on June 21, 2020, in favor of removing Confederate monuments, Ringle told the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Ringle serves as the executive editor of the student newspaper, The Commonwealth Times. In a phone interview with CPJ, a founding partner of the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, he said that a Richmond police officer sprayed him in the face twice around 9 p.m. As he fumbled around, vision obfuscated from the pepper spray, Ringle bumped into an officer who picked him up and threw him to the ground, the journalist told CPJ. A protester helped Ringle, who left the demonstration and went to his friend’s apartment, he said.
Ringle’s left knee and left elbow were bruised during the incident. Ringle posted to his Twitter account pictures of his injuries the evening they occured. Two days later, his hands were still tender from the pepper spray, he told CPJ on June 23.
The journalist told CPJ that he was wearing a state-issued press badge granted as part of a college class when he encountered police.
Richmond Police did not respond to CPJ’s email or voicemail requests for comment. Virginia State Police referred CPJ to its Public Relations Director, Corinne Geller, who did not respond to CPJ’s email requesting comment.
Independent multimedia journalist Jordan Pickett was hit and injured by a crowd-control projectile fired by law enforcement officers while he covered protests against police violence in Seattle on June 8, 2020.
The Seattle demonstrations were one of many that have swept across the country in response to the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis on May 25.
On the evening of Sunday, June 7, most protesters were gathered in one area near Capitol Hill along East Pine Street and 10th Avenue, Pickett told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. He had been covering the action in the front, but began to slowly retreat as police officers deployed tear gas to force protesters to disperse.
“At that point, a flash bang grenade went off almost directly on my foot and that was scary enough that I started to push back further,” Pickett remembered. “I was walking with both of my cameras held up to try to appear as not intimidating as possible.”
Pickett said he also had a press badge around his neck and large pieces of white duct tape with the word “PRESS” written in black Sharpie on his hat and backpack.
At 12:23 a.m. on June 8, officers hit Pickett with what he believes was a 40mm baton round in the back of his right thigh, he told the Tracker. In a tweet sent at 3:02 a.m., he wrote the projectile tore through thick jeans from more than 50 feet away, breaking the skin and making him collapse in pain.
According to his estimates, officers were still more than 50 feet away. Picket crawled behind a parked car to regain his composure while more tear gas was released around him. He said he was momentarily blinded and still disoriented when he got up and started walking towards Broadway, where a protester sprayed a baking-soda solution in his eyes.
“Either officers identified me as press and shot anyway, are shooting so quickly or indiscriminately that they can’t identify their targets first or weren’t aiming for me and shot inaccurately,” Pickett wrote in another tweet. “All three seem problematic.”
On Sept. 25, the law firm of Stritmatter Kessler Koehler Moore filed a lawsuit against the City of Seattle and State of Washington on the behalf of “peaceful protesters,” including Pickett, claiming the city enabled police officers’ “unreasonable and disproportionate conduct” and the “widescale use of excessive force,” violating rights protected under the First Amendment.
Seattle Police Department spokesman Randy Huserik declined to comment, citing a policy of not discussing pending litigation. He confirmed that SWAT officers were deployed but said they do not use baton rounds.
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker is documenting several hundred incidents of journalists being assaulted, arrested, struck by crowd control ammunition or tear gas or having their equipment damaged while covering protests across the country.
Shortly after being hit with a crowd-control munition while covering a protest in Seattle on June 8, journalist Jordan Pickett posted these images on Twitter, saying he was clearly identifiable as working press.
",None,None,None,None,False,20-2-14351-1,['ONGOING'],Civil,None,False,None,None,None,False,False,None,None,law enforcement,unknown,False,None,[],None,None,None,None,None,None,False,None,,"Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter 1 year, Black Lives Matter 2020, chemical irritant, protest, shot / shot at, student journalism",,, 2020-07-29 18:41:21.413848+00:00,2022-03-10 22:02:10.897374+00:00,"Student journalist pepper sprayed, threatened with arrest amid Columbus protests",https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/student-journalist-pepper-sprayed-threatened-with-arrest-amid-columbus-protests/,2022-03-10 22:02:10.837196+00:00,,,,Assault,,,,Maeve Walsh (The Lantern),,2020-06-01,False,Columbus,Ohio (OH),39.96118,-82.99879,"Three journalists from The Lantern, the Ohio State University student newspaper, were pepper sprayed and threatened with arrest by police officers while covering protests in Columbus, Ohio, on June 1, 2020. The three students clearly and repeatedly identified themselves as members of the media before the assault, according to interviews with the journalists and video footage of the incident.
The protests were held in response to a video showing a white police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, a Black man, during an arrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25. Floyd was pronounced dead at a local hospital. Protests against police violence and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement have been held across the U.S. since the end of May.
On the night of June 1, Lantern editors Maeve Walsh, Sarah Szilagy and Max Garrison were covering peaceful protests that had moved from the Ohio Statehouse in downtown Columbus toward the Ohio State University campus. About 20 minutes after a 10 p.m. curfew went into effect, the protesters reached the intersection of North High Street and Lane Avenue on the edge of campus.
Up until this point, the journalists had not noticed a police presence. A few minutes after reaching the intersection, however, police cars suddenly arrived and stopped behind the protesters, Walsh and Garrison told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.
Police officers got out of their cars, walked swiftly through the crowd, and began using pepper spray to disperse the protesters, they said. The three journalists, who were standing behind a concrete barrier on the sidewalk, somewhat removed from the protesters in the street, remained on the scene as the protesters left, Walsh and Garrison told the Tracker. Szilagy, the Lantern’s campus editor, did not respond to emailed requests for comment.
The journalists were then “approached from multiple directions by police officers telling them to ‘go home’ because of the curfew,” according to an account of the incident Garrison wrote for The Lantern.
Walsh, special projects editor, said that all three journalists were holding their press passes in the air to show them to the officers and repeatedly identified themselves as press. In a video Walsh posted to Twitter, an officer tells her, “Leave or you’re going to jail.” When Walsh responds, “we’re members of the media,” the officer says, “I don’t care.”
Columbus Police began spraying protestors around 10:25 at the corner of High and Lane. @m_p_garrison @sarahszilagy and I were also sprayed despite making them aware we are members of @TheLantern. The press is exempt from the curfew. pic.twitter.com/BcyitLujyQ
— Maeve Walsh (@maevewalsh27) June 2, 2020
Another group of officers approached and “got very close to us,” according to Garrison, forcing them to step back. Garrison said one officer pushed him. Another shot pepper spray at the group from point-blank range, hitting him on the arm and Szilagy in the eyes, Garrison said. Walsh was not directly hit, but said the gas made her cough.
In a video of the incident The Lantern posted to Twitter, the journalists are pepper sprayed after repeatedly identifying as media who are “exempt from curfew.”
Hi everyone: this was me. I was sprayed in the face after we identified ourselves and presented our press passes multiple times. Media are exempt from curfew. Media are exempt from curfew. https://t.co/DAIDudVpud
— Sarah Szilagy (@sarahszilagy) June 2, 2020
Adam Cairns, a staff photographer with the Columbus Dispatch, witnessed the attack. Cairns told the Tracker that he had been standing near the edge of the intersection with the student journalists, but turned to walk away before another officer came around the corner and shot pepper spray at the journalists. “[I] will attest that they were screaming at the cops that they were media,” Cairns posted to Twitter. “Police, despite clearly seeing press credentials, did not care. I crossed Lane at that point and missed the pepper spray.”
Here is a photo of @TheLantern journalists showing their press IDs to police moments before being pepper sprayed pic.twitter.com/Mvr4TLT83F
— Adam Cairns (@atomicphoto) June 2, 2020
The three journalists turned to flee but were followed by an officer who fired pepper spray at their backs before they turned into an alley, according to Garrison. They then sought refuge nearby at the house of their editor, Sam Raudins, where they spent several hours recovering. None of them returned to the protests that night. “They basically just censored us,” Szilagy told The Washington Post, “and made us incapable of covering other things that happened that night.”
In the hours following the attack, Raudins sent an email to the Columbus Division of Police reporting the incident. “This was not our team getting caught in the crossfire; this was a direct interaction between CPD and The Lantern,” she wrote in the letter posted to Twitter.
Our editor-in-chief @sam_raudins emailed @ColumbusPolice, reporting how officers threatened to arrest and then pepper-sprayed our reporters after our reporters identified themselves as members of the news media. #columbusprotest pic.twitter.com/UXaSYC9bVQ
— The Lantern (@TheLantern) June 2, 2020
In a press conference the following day, Columbus Police Chief Thomas Quinlan was asked about the police officers’ treatment of journalists.
“There’s no malice involved, there’s no intent, it’s just a very chaotic situation,” Quinlan said. “And in that regard, I’d ask the public to have some patience and please comply, and we’ll work it out afterward. But please don’t stand there and argue; move along and comply and we’ll fix this after the fact so nothing bad happens.”
Quinlan also said, “we are dealing with imperfect human beings in imperfect situations. Mistakes will happen and we will take action to correct them and make sure that we do not allow our mistakes to be repeated.”
When asked specifically about the incident involving the Ohio State student journalists, Quinlan said the reporters were not easily recognizable as news media, but the department had launched an internal affairs investigation of the officers, the Dispatch reported.
“We are aware of the incident in question and it is currently under investigation per our use of force policy,” Sergeant James Fuqua, public information officer, said in response to the Tracker’s request for a status update.
The Columbus Division of Police did not respond to the Tracker’s request for comment.
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documents journalists assaulted, arrested, struck by crowd-control ammunition or tear gas or who had their equipment damaged in the course of reporting. Find all incidents related to Black Lives Matter and anti-police brutality protests here.
Three journalists from The Lantern, the Ohio State University student newspaper, were pepper sprayed and threatened with arrest by police officers while covering protests in Columbus, Ohio, on June 1, 2020. The three students clearly and repeatedly identified themselves as members of the media before the assault, according to interviews with the journalists and video footage of the incident.
The protests were held in response to a video showing a white police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, a Black man, during an arrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25. Floyd was pronounced dead at a local hospital. Protests against police violence and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement have been held across the U.S. since the end of May.
On the night of June 1, Lantern editors Max Garrison, Sarah Szilagy and Maeve Walsh were covering peaceful protests that had moved from the Ohio Statehouse in downtown Columbus toward the Ohio State University campus. About 20 minutes after a 10 p.m. curfew went into effect, the protesters reached the intersection of North High Street and Lane Avenue on the edge of campus.
Up until this point, the journalists had not noticed a police presence. A few minutes after reaching the intersection, however, police cars suddenly arrived and stopped behind the protesters, Garrison and Walsh told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.
Police officers got out of their cars, walked swiftly through the crowd, and began using pepper spray to disperse the protesters, they said. The three journalists, who were standing behind a concrete barrier on the sidewalk, somewhat removed from the protesters in the street, remained on the scene as the protesters left, Garrison and Walsh told the Tracker. Szilagy, the Lantern’s campus editor, did not respond to emailed requests for comment.
The journalists were then “approached from multiple directions by police officers telling them to ‘go home’ because of the curfew,” according to an account of the incident Garrison wrote for The Lantern.
“Our reporters continued to film and identify themselves as members of the news media, who are exempt from the curfew,” wrote Garrison, who is the assistant campus editor. “A group of police officers continued to yell over our reporters, saying they ‘don’t care’ and ‘get inside.’ The officers also threatened our reporters with arrest.”
Columbus Police began spraying protestors around 10:25 at the corner of High and Lane. @m_p_garrison @sarahszilagy and I were also sprayed despite making them aware we are members of @TheLantern. The press is exempt from the curfew. pic.twitter.com/BcyitLujyQ
— Maeve Walsh (@maevewalsh27) June 2, 2020
Another group of officers approached and “got very close to us,” according to Garrison, forcing them to step back. Garrison said one officer pushed him. Another shot pepper spray at the group from point-blank range, hitting him on the arm and Szilagy in the eyes, Garrison said. Walsh was not directly hit, but said the gas made her cough.
In a video of the incident The Lantern posted to Twitter, the journalists are pepper sprayed after repeatedly identifying as media who are “exempt from curfew.”
Hi everyone: this was me. I was sprayed in the face after we identified ourselves and presented our press passes multiple times. Media are exempt from curfew. Media are exempt from curfew. https://t.co/DAIDudVpud
— Sarah Szilagy (@sarahszilagy) June 2, 2020
Adam Cairns, a staff photographer with the Columbus Dispatch, witnessed the attack. Cairns told the Tracker that he had been standing near the edge of the intersection with the student journalists, but turned to walk away before another officer came around the corner and shot pepper spray at the journalists. “[I] will attest that they were screaming at the cops that they were media,” Cairns posted to Twitter. “Police, despite clearly seeing press credentials, did not care. I crossed Lane at that point and missed the pepper spray.”
Here is a photo of @TheLantern journalists showing their press IDs to police moments before being pepper sprayed pic.twitter.com/Mvr4TLT83F
— Adam Cairns (@atomicphoto) June 2, 2020
The three journalists turned to flee but were followed by an officer who fired pepper spray at their backs before they turned into an alley, according to Garrison. They then sought refuge nearby at the house of their editor, Sam Raudins, where they spent several hours recovering. None of them returned to the protests that night. “They basically just censored us,” Szilagy told The Washington Post, “and made us incapable of covering other things that happened that night.”
In the hours following the attack, Raudins sent an email to the Columbus Division of Police reporting the incident. “This was not our team getting caught in the crossfire; this was a direct interaction between CPD and The Lantern,” she wrote in the letter posted to Twitter.
Our editor-in-chief @sam_raudins emailed @ColumbusPolice, reporting how officers threatened to arrest and then pepper-sprayed our reporters after our reporters identified themselves as members of the news media. #columbusprotest pic.twitter.com/UXaSYC9bVQ
— The Lantern (@TheLantern) June 2, 2020
In a press conference the following day, Columbus Police Chief Thomas Quinlan was asked about the police officers’ treatment of journalists.
“There’s no malice involved, there’s no intent, it’s just a very chaotic situation,” Quinlan said. “And in that regard, I’d ask the public to have some patience and please comply, and we’ll work it out afterward. But please don’t stand there and argue; move along and comply and we’ll fix this after the fact so nothing bad happens.”
Quinlan also said, “we are dealing with imperfect human beings in imperfect situations. Mistakes will happen and we will take action to correct them and make sure that we do not allow our mistakes to be repeated.”
When asked specifically about the incident involving the Ohio State student journalists, Quinlan said the reporters were not easily recognizable as news media, but the department had launched an internal affairs investigation of the officers, the Dispatch reported.
“We are aware of the incident in question and it is currently under investigation per our use of force policy,” Sergeant James Fuqua, public information officer, said in response to the Tracker’s request for a status update.
The Columbus Division of Police did not respond to the Tracker’s request for comment.
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documents journalists assaulted, arrested, struck by crowd-control ammunition or tear gas or who had their equipment damaged in the course of reporting. Find all incidents related to Black Lives Matter and anti-police brutality protests here.
Three journalists from The Lantern, the Ohio State University student newspaper, were pepper sprayed and threatened with arrest by police officers while covering protests in Columbus, Ohio, on June 1, 2020. The three students clearly and repeatedly identified themselves as members of the media before the assault, according to interviews with the journalists and video footage of the incident.
The protests were held in response to a video showing a white police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, a Black man, during an arrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25. Floyd was pronounced dead at a local hospital. Protests against police violence and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement have been held across the U.S. since the end of May.
On the night of June 1, Lantern editors Sarah Szilagy, Max Garrison and Maeve Walsh were covering peaceful protests that had moved from the Ohio Statehouse in downtown Columbus toward the Ohio State University campus. About 20 minutes after a 10 p.m. curfew went into effect, the protesters reached the intersection of North High Street and Lane Avenue on the edge of campus.
Up until this point, the journalists had not noticed a police presence. A few minutes after reaching the intersection, however, police cars suddenly arrived and stopped behind the protesters, Walsh and Garrison told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Szilagy, the Lantern’s campus editor, did not respond to emailed requests for comment.
Police officers got out of their cars, walked swiftly through the crowd, and began using pepper spray to disperse the protesters, they said. The three journalists, who were standing behind a concrete barrier on the sidewalk, somewhat removed from the protesters in the street, remained on the scene as the protesters left, Walsh and Garrison told the Tracker.
The journalists were then approached from multiple directions by officers ordering them to “go home” because of the curfew, according to an account of the incident Garrison wrote for The Lantern. They continued to film and identify themselves as press, holding their press passes in the air, Walsh said. The officers responded that they “don’t care” and threatened to arrest the journalists if they didn’t disperse.
Another group of officers approached and “got very close to us,” according to Garrison, forcing them to step back. Garrison said one officer pushed him. Another shot pepper spray at the group from point-blank range, hitting him on the arm and Szilagy in the eyes, Garrison said. Walsh was not directly hit, but said the gas made her cough.
In a video of the incident The Lantern posted to Twitter, the journalists are pepper sprayed after repeatedly identifying as media who are “exempt from curfew.”
Hi everyone: this was me. I was sprayed in the face after we identified ourselves and presented our press passes multiple times. Media are exempt from curfew. Media are exempt from curfew. https://t.co/DAIDudVpud
— Sarah Szilagy (@sarahszilagy) June 2, 2020
Adam Cairns, a staff photographer with the Columbus Dispatch, witnessed the attack. Cairns told the Tracker that he had been standing near the edge of the intersection with the student journalists, but turned to walk away before another officer came around the corner and shot pepper spray at the journalists. “[I] will attest that they were screaming at the cops that they were media,” Cairns posted to Twitter. “Police, despite clearly seeing press credentials, did not care. I crossed Lane at that point and missed the pepper spray.”
Here is a photo of @TheLantern journalists showing their press IDs to police moments before being pepper sprayed pic.twitter.com/Mvr4TLT83F
— Adam Cairns (@atomicphoto) June 2, 2020
The three journalists turned to flee but were followed by an officer who fired pepper spray at their backs before they turned into an alley, according to Garrison. They then sought refuge nearby at the house of their editor, Sam Raudins, where they spent several hours recovering. None of them returned to the protests that night. “They basically just censored us,” Szilagy told The Washington Post, “and made us incapable of covering other things that happened that night.”
In the hours following the attack, Raudins sent an email to the Columbus Division of Police reporting the incident. “This was not our team getting caught in the crossfire; this was a direct interaction between CPD and The Lantern,” she wrote in the letter posted to Twitter.
Our editor-in-chief @sam_raudins emailed @ColumbusPolice, reporting how officers threatened to arrest and then pepper-sprayed our reporters after our reporters identified themselves as members of the news media. #columbusprotest pic.twitter.com/UXaSYC9bVQ
— The Lantern (@TheLantern) June 2, 2020
In a press conference the following day, Columbus Police Chief Thomas Quinlan was asked about the police officers’ treatment of journalists.
“There’s no malice involved, there’s no intent, it’s just a very chaotic situation,” Quinlan said. “And in that regard, I’d ask the public to have some patience and please comply, and we’ll work it out afterward. But please don’t stand there and argue; move along and comply and we’ll fix this after the fact so nothing bad happens.”
Quinlan also said, “we are dealing with imperfect human beings in imperfect situations. Mistakes will happen and we will take action to correct them and make sure that we do not allow our mistakes to be repeated.”
When asked specifically about the incident involving the Ohio State student journalists, Quinlan said the reporters were not easily recognizable as news media, but the department had launched an internal affairs investigation of the officers, the Dispatch reported.
“We are aware of the incident in question and it is currently under investigation per our use of force policy,” Sergeant James Fuqua, public information officer, said in response to the Tracker’s request for a status update.
The Columbus Division of Police did not respond to the Tracker’s request for comment.
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documents journalists assaulted, arrested, struck by crowd-control ammunition or tear gas or who had their equipment damaged in the course of reporting. Find all incidents related to Black Lives Matter and anti-police brutality protests here.
Andrew Gunn, a journalist for the student-run newspaper at the University of New Mexico, was hit by a ricochet foam-tipped munition when law enforcement officers fired into a small protest that Gunn and his colleagues were covering in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on May 31, 2020.
Protests that began in Minnesota on May 26 have spread across the country, sparked by a video showing a police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, a black man, during an arrest the day before. Floyd was later pronounced dead at a hospital.
Gunn, a senior reporter and copy editor for the New Mexico Daily Lobo, told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that he arrived in downtown Albuquerque at 1 a.m to document the protests, joining a group of colleagues.
Approximately 30 minutes later, Gunn said he was standing with photo editor Sharon Chischilly and reporter and photographer Liam DeBonis reporting on the protests when officers fired tear without warning.
Gunn said that all three journalists were clearly identified as media, with DeBonis wearing a helmet marked with the word “PRESS.”
.@LiamDebonis ‘s helmet is brilliant! pic.twitter.com/j7e9HXlu83
— Sharon Chischilly (@Schischillyy) June 1, 2020
Gunn continued reporting via livestream on Twitter. He said that shortly after he turned off the livestream just after 2 a.m., law enforcement fired foam rounds at protesters, and one ricocheted off the street and struck him in the back.
— ᴀɴᴅʀᴇᴡ ɢᴜɴɴ 🏳️🌈 (@agunnwrites) June 1, 2020
Gunn said that two other colleagues, data editor Joe Rull and senior reporter Bella Davis, were standing with him also wearing press identification when the officers opened fire; Gunn said no one was injured.
“Everyone is safe and unharmed, and things are quieting down, but I was quite shaken by the encounter along with my colleagues,” said Gunn, who provided a photograph of the munition to the Tracker.
Gunn said that these incidents followed similar ones earlier in the evening. Before Gunn arrived on the scene he said colleagues told him they were fired upon with tear gas and foam rounds.
had to run back because they shot something toward the crowd pic.twitter.com/3BUJBSs5OY
— Joe Rull (@rulljoe) June 1, 2020
Gunn said he saw officers with the Albuquerque Police Department, the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department and the New Mexico State Police on patrol; he is not certain to which agency the officers firing the foam rounds or the tear gas belonged.
The Tracker contacted all three agencies but did not receive immediate responses from APD or the Sheriff’s Department.
The New Mexico State Police deferred comment to the Albuquerque Police Department, which it said was the lead agency in charge of managing the protests.
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker is documenting damage of equipment and multiple journalists arrested or struck by crowd control ammunition or tear gas while covering related protests across the country. Find all of these cases here.
Student journalist Joe Rull picked up this foam-tipped munition shortly after he and colleagues from the New Mexico Daily Lobo were fired upon by law enforcement in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
",None,None,None,None,False,None,[],None,None,False,None,None,None,False,False,None,None,law enforcement,unknown,False,None,[],None,None,None,None,None,None,False,[],,"Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter 1 year, Black Lives Matter 2020, protest, shot / shot at, student journalism",,, 2020-06-01 02:02:18.097177+00:00,2022-03-10 22:05:23.398364+00:00,"Student journalist chased, pepper sprayed during protests in Columbus",https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/student-journalist-chased-pepper-sprayed-during-protests-columbus/,2022-03-10 22:05:23.337036+00:00,,,,Assault,,,,Julia Lerner,,2020-05-30,False,Columbus,Ohio (OH),39.96118,-82.99879,"A student journalist at the University of Maryland was chased by police and maced three times while covering protests in Columbus, Ohio, in the early hours of May 30, 2020.
Protests that began in Minnesota on May 26 have spread across the country, sparked by a video showing a police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, a black man, during an arrest on May 25. Floyd was later pronounced dead at a hospital.
Student journalist Julia Lerner told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that at about 1 a.m. she was making her way toward her car after documenting protests near the courthouse in Columbus. Three or four people were on the sidewalk near her, but most protesters had dispersed, at least from that area.
Lerner told the Tracker that she had stopped on the sidewalk to put her camera away when she noticed a line of police officers up the block, including two on bicycles. The officers began shouting at those still present to leave the area.
“[The officers] started screaming. The woman next to me took off running in the other direction and I put my hands up — with my camera in my hand — and yelled, “I’m a journalist, I’m just trying to go to my car,” Lerner said.
She said that one of the bicycle officers responded, “It’s too fucking late to leave.”
The officer then came at her, Lerner said, and pepper sprayed her, primarily hitting her arms and camera as she held her hands in front of her face.
Lerner said the officer pepper sprayed her at least two more times as she attempted to run away, only letting up once Lerner rounded another street corner into an alleyway. She told the Tracker she hid in the alley for approximately 20 minutes before finally making her way to her car.
Lerner said that her camera appears to still be in working order.
“As journalists, we have the responsibility to expose violence and corruption within our systems. We have the responsibility to stand steadfast when threatened,” Lerner tweeted after the incident. “We can’t let cops chase us away.”
The Columbus Police Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker is documenting damage of equipment and multiple journalists arrested or struck by crowd control ammunition or tear gas while covering related protests across the country. Find all of these cases here.
A Columbus, Ohio, police officer on a bike chased student journalist Julia Lerner and pepper sprayed her multiple times after she identified herself as press.
",None,None,None,None,False,None,[],None,None,False,None,None,None,False,False,None,None,law enforcement,yes,False,None,[],None,None,None,None,None,None,False,None,,"Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter 1 year, Black Lives Matter 2020, chemical irritant, protest, student journalism",,, 2021-09-29 17:45:06.972021+00:00,2023-07-17 20:20:26.787102+00:00,LAPD officer aims weapon at student reporter during protest,https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/lapd-officer-aims-weapon-at-student-reporter-during-protest/,2023-07-17 20:20:26.680351+00:00,,,,Assault,,,,Jintak Han (Daily Bruin),,2020-05-30,False,Los Angeles,California (CA),34.05223,-118.24368,"Jintak Han, a photographer and reporter for the Daily Bruin, UCLA’s student newspaper, was shot at by law enforcement while covering protests in Los Angeles, California, on May 30, 2020.
The protests were held in response to a video showing a white police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, a Black man, during an arrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25. Floyd was pronounced dead at a local hospital. Protests against police brutality and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement have been held across the United States since the end of May.
Han told the Committee to Protect Journalists — a founding partner of the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker — that he was wrapping up an afternoon reporting on the protests and trying to cross Beverly Boulevard to head back to his car around 7:15 p.m. when he found himself facing a police line that was clearing protesters block-by-block.
Han said he was readily identifiable as a journalist, wearing a press pass, as well as a white helmet and a vest emblazoned with “PRESS,” and carrying three cameras.
Despite this, he said, an officer aimed his weapon at him, prompting Han to raise both hands in the air. He moved into an opening, and soon was standing “some distance away” from a group of four protesters who were shielding themselves behind a mattress when officers opened fire. “The rubber bullets fell short and hit the ground near my feet before I hid behind the mattress,” he told CPJ.
.@LAPD fired rubber bullets at me despite me:
— Jintak Han (한진탁) (@jintakhan) May 31, 2020
1. Wearing my press helmet
2. Wearing my press vest
3. Wearing my press pass
4. Telling them I’m press
Thankfully they missed. pic.twitter.com/jyLRF1Wt81
LAPD did not respond to an email requesting comment.
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documents journalists assaulted, arrested, struck by crowd-control ammunition or tear gas or who had their equipment damaged in the course of reporting. Find all incidents related to Black Lives Matter and anti-police brutality protests here.
Student journalist Euirim Choi was served a subpoena on May 22, 2019, in connection with a lawsuit between The Thomas L. Pearson and The Pearson Family Members Foundation and the University of Chicago. Choi is the former editor of the university’s student newspaper, The Chicago Maroon, and has been asked for documents and communications pertaining to an article he wrote as editor.
On March 5, 2018, The Maroon published Choi’s article on the unravelling of relations between the university and the foundation over the course of a year. The foundation and university had filed a lawsuit and countersuit, respectively, contesting a $100 million donation pledged by the foundation.
The article was based on documents included in a 66-page stack found in a subway trash can in northern Chicago and brought to the newspaper’s office in the summer of 2017, The Maroon reported. While The Maroon published a summary of some of the documents that August, it did not include documents connected to the Pearsons or the Institute they were funding.
“The Maroon decided not to publish or mention the Pearson Institute documents, which were marked ‘privileged and confidential attorney-client communication,’ in order to avoid escalating a still-nascent dispute,” Choi wrote in his report the following March. But, as the lawsuit moved forward, the paper decided to publish the documents to provide context on the dispute.
Some handwritten notes were redacted from the documents shared with the piece, Choi wrote, in order to obscure the identity of the source. Even though the newspaper was unaware of the original owner’s identity, they did not know whether the documents had been intentionally leaked.
The foundation filed a subpoena against The Maroon on May 17, asking not only for the unredacted document, but “all other documents and communications related thereto or obtained in connection therewith, including without limitation the ‘66 pages of internal university documents’ referenced” in Choi’s article.
Choi told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that the current editors at The Maroon reached out to him once they received the subpoena, as he was the only remaining person with access to the documents. Though they had made six copies, Choi said, the original documents were lost and all but his digital copy were deliberately destroyed.
When the foundation was informed that it would have to pursue the documents through Choi, it issued him a subpoena on May 22. In addition to the unredacted documents, the subpoena requested information on Choi’s reporting process, including any documents or evidence on how The Maroon obtained the documents and the identity of the author, if known. The deadline for response was June 3.
Peter Scheer, board president of the First Amendment Coalition, told CNN Business that the fact Choi is a student journalist “could complicate matters.”
“It could be up for debate whether a student journalist is granted the same protections as a journalist reporting as their full-time job,” Scheer said.
Matt Topic, a government transparency and media lawyer who is representing Choi pro-bono, told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that he is confident that the qualified privilege granted by Illinois’ Shield Law applies to Choi.
The statute defines a reporter as “any person regularly engaged in the business of collecting, writing or editing news for publication through a news medium on a full-time or part-time basis.”
Choi told the Tracker that he and Topic had filed a response to the subpoena and are continuing to fight it.
Euirim Choi was served with a subpoena for documents and work product from his time as editor of the student newspaper at the University of Chicago.
",None,None,None,None,False,None,[],None,None,False,None,None,None,False,False,None,None,None,None,False,journalist communications or work product,['PENDING'],None,None,Journalist,subpoena,Federal,None,False,[],,student journalism,,, 2019-06-11 17:17:39.665354+00:00,2023-07-12 23:32:08.249201+00:00,Student newspaper subpoenaed for documents and reporting materials as part of $100 million dispute,https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/student-newspaper-subpoenaed-documents-and-reporting-materials-part-100-million-dispute/,2023-07-12 23:32:08.088960+00:00,,LegalOrder object (59),,Subpoena/Legal Order,,,,,,2019-05-17,False,Chicago,Illinois (IL),41.85003,-87.65005,"The Chicago Maroon, the University of Chicago’s student newspaper, was served a subpoena on May 17, 2019, in connection with a lawsuit between The Thomas L. Pearson and The Pearson Family Members Foundation and the university.
On March 5, 2018, The Maroon published an article written by then-editor Euirim Choi on the unravelling of relations between the university and the foundation over the course of a year. The foundation and university had filed a lawsuit and countersuit, respectively, contesting a $100 million donation pledged by the foundation.
The article was based on documents included in a 66-page stack found in a subway trash can in northern Chicago and brought to the newspaper’s office in the summer of 2017, The Maroon reported. While The Maroon published a summary of some of the documents that August, it did not include documents connected to the Pearsons or the Institute they were funding.
“The Maroon decided not to publish or mention the Pearson Institute documents, which were marked ‘privileged and confidential attorney-client communication,’ in order to avoid escalating a still-nascent dispute,” Choi wrote in his report the following March. But, as the lawsuit was moving forward, the paper decided to publish the documents to provide context on the dispute.
Some handwritten notes were redacted from the documents shared with the piece, Choi wrote, in order to obscure the identity of the source. Even though the newspaper was unaware of the original owner’s identity, they did not know whether the documents had been intentionally leaked.
The foundation filed a subpoena against The Maroon on May 17 asking not only for the unredacted document, but “all other documents and communications related thereto or obtained in connection therewith, including without limitation the ‘66 pages of internal university documents’ referenced” in Choi’s article.
When the foundation discovered that only Choi, and not the student newspaper, has access to the documents, it filed a subpoena against him on May 22. Choi said the foundation’s subpoena against The Maroon has been left active, however, to satisfy that the foundation is using all avenues of discovery.
As is the case with Choi, some First Amendment scholars are concerned that Illinois’s shield law may not be applicable to The Maroon as it is a student newspaper.
The statute defines a news medium in part as, “any newspaper or other periodical issued at regular intervals whether in print or electronic format and having a general circulation.” The Maroon appears to meet this definition.
Choi told the Tracker that the current editors at The Maroon informed the Pearson Foundation that they cannot provide the requested documents because they are no longer in possession of any copies. The University of Chicago told WBEZ News in a statement that it has reached out to staff at The Maroon to help find capable legal counsel and that they recognize the editorial independence of the paper and its staff.
The independent student newspaper of the University of Chicago, The Chicago Maroon, has been subpoenaed by a private foundation for documents used in reporting.
",None,None,None,None,False,None,[],None,None,False,None,None,None,False,False,None,None,None,None,False,journalist communications or work product,['PENDING'],None,None,Institution,subpoena,Federal,None,False,None,The Chicago Maroon,student journalism,,, 2019-05-03 13:33:24.768637+00:00,2024-02-29 17:33:02.298371+00:00,"School district demands prior review, threatens job of adviser over profile in student publication",https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/school-district-demands-prior-review-threatens-job-adviser-over-profile-student-publication/,2024-02-29 17:33:02.208049+00:00,,,,Other Incident,,,,,,2019-04-11,False,Stockton,California (CA),37.9577,-121.29078,"Administrators with the Lodi Unified School District in California demanded a student newspaper adviser submit an article for review prior to publication, under threat of discipline and dismissal.
The latest edition of Bear Creek High School’s student newspaper, the Bruin Voice, is set to include a profile of an 18-year-old student who is active in the porn industry.
“This young woman has quite a story to tell,” the paper’s adviser, Kathi Duffel, told The Washington Post. “She has every right to tell her story, and we have every right to report it.” Duffel said the administrators do not seem to understand that First Amendment rights must be respected.
Word about the profile spread around the school, and Bear Creek High School Principal Hillary Harrell delivered a letter by Lodi Unified School District Superintendent Cathy Nichols-Washer to Duffel on April 11, 2019.
“You are hereby directed to refrain from publishing the article prior to the District’s review and approval,” Nichols-Washer wrote. “Should you fail to provide a copy of the article as directed, you may be subject to discipline, up to and including dismissal.”
As longtime adviser of the Bruin Voice, Duffel has won awards for her leadership — including in previous fights over censorship with Bear Creek High School.
Lilly Lim, a managing editor, sports editor, and photography editor at The Bruin Voice, told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that newspapers containing the student profile will be distributed on May 3.
“As an editorial staff, we unanimously decided to continue with writing the story and submit it into publication,” Lim, a junior, said. “Soon after we notified the district of our decision, the request turned into a mandate whereby we were demanded to send a review. Since then, everything has been a back-and-forth battle.”
In a statement released by Lodi Unified School District on May 1, the district stated it will not continue to seek to prevent the article’s publication
“The District has determined that it will rely on the promises Mrs. Duffel’s personal attorney has made on her behalf regarding the content of the article and on that basis will not prevent its publication. However, the District does not agree with all aspects of the legal opinion provided by the attorney and is disappointed that an independent review was not provided as agreed to by the District and Mrs. Duffel. Moreover, because the District has been denied an opportunity to preview the article, the District does not endorse it. Because we are charged with the education and care of our community’s children, we will always be diligent in our efforts to provide a safe learning environment for all students, while complying with our obligations under the law.”
The Washington Post reported that Duffel emphasized that in her decades as a student newspaper adviser, she has “never buckled and provided the administration with a copy of a story in advance.”
Lim said Duffel has had a significant impact on her life during her tenure at Bear Creek High School. “Ms. Duffel is, in my opinion, the most renowned and influential teacher on Bear Creek's campus,” she told the Tracker.
A reporter and multimedia editor for The Harvard Crimson, the university’s daily paper, was issued a subpoena on April 10, 2019, to testify in a deposition and provide communications and reporting materials.
Shera Avi-Yonah was one of The Crimson reporters who had written on activities around and including a defamation lawsuit brought by Harvard College staff members Carl and Valencia Miller against Gail O’Keefe, a faculty dean.
The defamation suit stemmed from interactions with a student activist and another faculty dean’s decision to represent Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood producer who is facing multiple allegations of sexual assault. Other journalists involved in the reporting did not receive subpoenas.
The Crimson reported that the subpoena specifically requested all of Avi-Yonah’s communications and documents “concerning” the Millers, as well as communications and documents related to the faculty deans and student activist Danu Mudannayake, who is also on staff at The Crimson.
The subpoena also required Avi-Yonah to testify at a May 14 deposition.
Robert Bertsche, an attorney representing The Crimson, filed a written objection to the subpoena on April 19. The Millers’ attorney, George Leontire, emailed a statement on his clients’ behalf a few days later communicating their intention to bring a motion to compel Avi-Yonah’s testimony.
Leontire also stated that he anticipated issuing “numerous other subpoenas,” and would not hesitate to depose other Crimson staff.
“If I believe other individuals at the Crimson have relevant or probative information relative to Dean Gal O’keefe’s [sic] defamation of the Millers I will seek to subpoena such individuals,” wrote Leontire, according to The Crimson.
Crimson President Kristine Guillaume wrote in an emailed statement to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that the paper would resist the subpoena because the reporter is not a party to the suit, citing the First Amendment.
Massachusetts does not have a shield law in place, though courts have recognized reporter’s privilege to protect their sources and reporting material under “common law.”
The president for The Harvard Crimson, the university’s daily newspaper, said the paper would resist a subpoena directed at a reporter’s communications.
",None,None,None,None,False,None,None,None,None,False,None,None,None,False,False,None,None,None,None,False,journalist communications or work product,None,None,None,Journalist,None,State,None,False,None,,student journalism,,, 2019-05-01 16:49:56.963315+00:00,2024-02-29 18:59:52.865397+00:00,Texas high school journalism adviser resigns; district implements prior review policies,https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/texas-high-school-journalism-advisor-resigns-district-implements-prior-review-policies/,2024-02-29 18:59:52.789404+00:00,,,,Other Incident,,,,,,2019-04-01,False,Katy,Texas (TX),29.78579,-95.8244,"The journalism adviser at a high school in Katy, Texas, has resigned after a prolonged conflict with school administration, which originated over how the yearbook should cover LGBTQ content. In the wake of this conflict, the principal also changed campus policy so that future issues of the yearbook will be subject to prior review.
The Seven Lakes High School teacher, Katie Moreno, declined to speak with the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker about the situation, citing the conditions of her employment contract with the Katy Independent School District. But she consulted with the legal team at the Student Press Law Center, and a staff attorney there, Sommer Ingram Dean, provided to the Tracker a 30-page document in which Moreno details her interactions with Seven Lakes principal Kerri Finnesand.
“When a school district forces an award-winning journalism teacher to resign, you have to think there’s something more to the story than what school officials may be stating. Time and time again we see fearless journalism advisers teaching their students sound, responsible journalism, and winning awards for it, but still struggling to keep a job,” Dean said. “Every adviser that is bullied out of a job and every student that is pressured into silence is a threat to free speech. I hope Seven Lakes understands the gravity of this situation.”
Moreno, who has taught at Seven Lakes since January 2014, was awarded the Journalism Education Association’s “Rising Star” award in November 2018, according to an article published by the Katy Times in January.
According to Moreno’s account, in November 2018 she brought a yearbook page for the Pride Club, the school’s group for LGBTQ students, to Finnesand for her review. The yearbook content had never been subject to prior review before, but Moreno showed it to Finnesand out of respect for a former administrator, whose child was featured on the page. Finnesand wrote in an email to Moreno that the administrator's child “will not be featured in the year book with the Pride Club” and ordered her to contact the parent of every student featured “about their child’s quote and the context of the club.” Finnesand did not respond to a request for comment.
Moreno drafted a permission slip for parents to sign and let the adviser of the Pride Club know about it. The adviser protested, saying that no other clubs faced such a requirement, so it could be construed as discriminatory. When the adviser brought it up directly with Finnesand, the principal told Moreno she was being “insubordinate” by broaching the topic with the Pride Club adviser.
On Dec. 5, a yearbook student sent a private message on social media, writing that the principal wanted to change the publication layout for several groups, and have the parents of all Pride Club members sign a permission slip. The student lamented that “[a]ll the work we’ve done to build these clubs, all the memories, all the growth, will all be excluded from the yearbook if we don’t use our voice now in whatever ways possible.” Another student reposted the message, and Moreno brought the message to Finnesand’s attention, who viewed it as a “personal attack,” according to Moreno’s documentation.
The next afternoon, Finnesand came into Moreno’s classroom and confronted her within earshot of her students. “She said I’m not doing my job, and that I clearly can’t control my kids. And I ‘let’ them go to social media to slander her. And because of that I don’t need to be the yearbook adviser here,” Moreno wrote.
A meeting between Finnesand and Moreno’s journalism students took place on Dec. 7, where they agreed on a plan on how to cover non-curriculum clubs in the yearbook going forward.
After the students left that meeting, Finnesand spoke with Moreno again where she expressed that she never has problems dealing with leaders of other organizations. Moreno, in her document, wrote her interactions with Finnesand left her feeling belittled: “[d]ue to the nature of student publications, there will be times she needs to have a conversation with the adviser and with the editors. Every single time I have contacted her with a question or an update, I am met with animosity, condescension, and judgement. This is an unfair comparison, as issues regarding censorship do not arise from service organizations or athletics.”
The print edition of the school’s newspaper, The Torch, has always operated under prior review. Moreno’s students dropped off a proof of the December issue for review by Finnesand on Dec. 3, and it was returned to Moreno without any comments. The issue’s cover included an edited image of a girl surrounded by a cloud of smoke, accompanying an article about vaping titled “A Fatal Fad.” The photograph was taken using dry ice. The cover was included in the approved proof binder, but after the issue was distributed, Moreno was given a performance review memorandum to sign for the image appearing on the cover.
Following a series of interactions with Finnesand, Moreno sent a grievance letter to Jeff Stocks, assistant superintendent of the Katy ISD, in which she outlined the communication difficulties she was having with Finnesand. At a meeting with Stocks and Finnesand on Jan. 8, 2019, Moreno was giving a document that stated that “campus administration will approve all pages of the SLHS yearbook,” a departure from the previous policy that did not require prior review. At the conclusion of that meeting, Finnesand informed Moreno that she would not be the yearbook or newspaper sponsor next school year, according to Moreno’s account.
According to Moreno’s account, after a series of meetings with a school district Human Resources representative where the future of Moreno’s teaching contract was called into question, she opted to resign on April 1, 2019.
Moreno will teach through the end of the school year, and in her resignation cited her intention to find a teaching position in another school district, Ingram Dean at the SPLC told the Tracker.
Justin Graham, the general counsel for Katy ISD, told the Tracker in an email that Moreno resigned “unilaterally and voluntarily” from her job at Seven Lakes.
Editor's Note: A previous version of this article incorrectly identified Jeff Stocks as superintendent of Katy Independent School District. Stocks is assistant superintendent.
Journalism adviser Katie Moreno, left, works with Seven Lakes High School students in Katy, Texas. In April 2019, Moreno resigned from her position following a series of disagreements with school administration about content.
",None,None,None,None,False,None,[],None,None,False,None,None,None,False,False,None,None,None,None,False,None,[],None,None,None,None,None,None,False,[],Katy Times,"LGBTQ+ rights, student journalism",,, 2020-03-12 15:51:33.353083+00:00,2022-08-05 18:54:12.349624+00:00,Student journalist among reporters arrested while covering Sacramento protest,https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/student-journalist-among-reporters-arrested-while-covering-sacramento-protest/,2022-08-05 18:54:12.280455+00:00,rioting: failure to disperse (charges dropped as of 2019-03-08),,,Arrest/Criminal Charge,,,,William Coburn (The State Hornet),,2019-03-04,False,Sacramento,California (CA),38.58157,-121.4944,"William Coburn, a reporter for the California State University student newspaper, The State Hornet, was one of three journalists arrested while covering a protest march on March 4, 2019, in Sacramento, California.
Then-Sacramento Business Journal reporter Scott Rodd and Sacramento Bee reporter Dale Kasler were also arrested that night. A Bee photojournalist, Hector Amezcua, was shoved to the ground by a bike officer when police began to cordon protesters.
About 100 people gathered around 6:30 p.m. in East Sacramento to protest the district attorney’s decision not to bring criminal charges against officers in the 2018 shooting death of Stephon Clark, a 22-year-old black man. The march proceeded uneventfully and eventually circled back to where it had begun, in a Trader Joe’s parking lot in the Fab 40s neighborhood.
Coburn told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that the march had started uneventfully, and that fewer people had gathered than in the days after Clark was killed. After about two hours, the march circled back to the parking lot where it had begun.
“It looked to me like the protest was winding down,” Coburn said.
Police spokesperson Sgt. Vance Chandler told NPR that officers gave 10 orders to disperse over a two-hour period. “Shortly after we started monitoring the group at [approximately] 7:30 p.m., we established the group was unlawfully assembling by standing in the street,” Chandler said.
Protest organizers also encouraged people to leave, Coburn said, and many did. Others were still mingling in the Trader Joe’s parking lot, including a few photographers, and Coburn joined them to conduct a few final interviews. Then, he said, a row of riot gear-clad officers formed a line and began slowly advancing, leaving the only exit down 51st Street.
“The police just started marching forward, taking a few steps and then stopping,” Coburn told the Tracker. “By stepping forward, we all started moving along 51st Street looking for places to get out, but all of them were blocked off, either by vans or by a few bike cops. It looked like it was just the two bike cops going over the overpass, so we assumed they just wanted us out of this neighborhood.”
A line of officers, unseeable at first, waited for them at the end of the bridge.
Police had received reports that at least five cars had been keyed, according to a tweet from Sacramento Police Department Capt. Norm Leong, and shortly after 10 p.m. officers began arresting those that had not dispersed.
The Bee reported that 84 people were arrested over the next four hours.
Coburn told the Tracker that he had a professional camera around his neck, and when officers came to arrest him he said repeatedly that he was a reporter.
“After a while I just stopped saying [that I was a journalist] because they just didn’t know what to do about it,” he said.
While he was originally in handcuffs, Coburn told the Tracker that once officers sat him down on the curb they switched him into flexi-cuffs. He sat that way for 2 ½ hours before police loaded all those arrested into vans heading to Cal Expo, a state fair ground, to be processed.
After more than four hours in detention, Coburn was released around 2:30 a.m. on March 5 with a ticket for failure to disperse and a court hearing scheduled on June 4.
The Sacramento County district attorney’s office announced a few days later that it would not charge those arrested at the protest, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Sacramento's police department and public safety accountability office are conducting ongoing internal investigations into the police tactics used during the protest, The Bee reported.
“I’m very disappointed the protest ended the way it did. I have many questions about what went on that precipitated the order to disperse and the subsequent arrests,” Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg tweeted in the early morning on March 5. “No matter the reason an order to disperse was given, no member of the press should be detained for doing their job.”
Kettling—surrounding protesters in order to prevent any exit, often followed by indiscriminate detentions and arrests—is used across the country as a protest response despite the risk it poses to journalists covering the protest.
Editor's Note: William Coburn originally reported to the Tracker that he was wearing university-issued press credentials when he was arrested, but it was later confirmed that he was not. This article was updated March 3, 2020.
A line of police officers follow Sacramento, California, protesters who gathered in response to the district attorney’s decision to not prosecute officers after the shooting death of a young black man.
",arrested and released,Sacramento Police Department,2019-03-05,2019-03-04,False,None,[],None,None,False,None,None,None,False,False,None,None,None,None,False,None,[],None,None,None,None,None,None,False,None,,"Black Lives Matter, court verdict, kettle, protest, student journalism",,, 2019-04-09 15:47:53.776714+00:00,2024-01-08 21:17:57.274429+00:00,Denver school administrators attempt to prevent student journalists from sharing work with the press,https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/denver-school-administrators-attempt-prevent-student-journalists-sharing-work-press/,2024-01-08 21:17:57.197384+00:00,,,,Other Incident,,,,Toby Lichtenwalter,,2019-02-12,True,Denver,Colorado (CO),39.73915,-104.9847,"School officials prohibited students at East High School in Denver, Colorado, from sharing their photographs and video of local teacher strikes with the press, in what some attorneys allege could be a violation of the First Amendment.
Student journalists at East High had been documenting a city-wide teachers strike since it began in February. Some shared content on social media platforms, and others shared their photographs and video with the press, including the Denver Post, which used the students’ work in its reporting on the strike.
Some students, according to the Denver Post, received pushback from school officials for sharing media with the press.
On Feb. 12, 2019, the Denver Post had reported that the executive producer of East High’s student broadcast team, Toby Lichtenwalter, said he was told that he was only permitted to film in a personal capacity. The Post reported at that time that East High School Principal John Youngquist said students who sent information to the press were acting “as agents of that media source.”
The next day, the Post reported that Lichtenwalter, 17, said he was given an ultimatum by the school principal — that he must either refrain from filming and taking photos inside the school, or leave. He chose to leave.
Other students at East High were also reprimanded for taking photos during the strike, including East High senior and student journalist Joe McComb, who was escorted out of a classroom for doing so.
On Feb. 14, Denver teaches ended the strike after reaching a deal that included a pay raise.
“The Supreme Court has long held that students in public schools do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,” Gregory Szewczyk, a private attorney, said in a statement published by the Denver Post. In at least the Lichtenwalter case, Szewczyk said he believes that “East High School’s position violates Mr. Lichtenwalter’s First Amendment rights.”
Mark Silverstein, ACLU of Colorado Legal Director, said that students have the right to document what is happening inside their schools.
“One cannot help but suspect that Denver Public Schools wants to hide from the public and the news media what’s actually going on inside the schools and inside the classrooms,” Silverstein said.
Teachers, students and members of the community march across from the Colorado State Capitol during a Denver public school teacher strike rally in February 2019.
",None,None,None,None,False,None,[],None,None,False,None,None,None,False,False,None,None,None,None,False,None,[],None,None,None,None,None,None,False,[],,student journalism,,, 2019-02-15 18:10:00.072279+00:00,2022-08-22 20:04:41.151541+00:00,Student photojournalist stopped at US-Mexico border for secondary screening,https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/two-photography-students-stopped-us-mexico-border-secondary-screening/,2022-08-22 20:04:41.075237+00:00,,,"(2019-11-20 00:00:00+00:00) Photojournalists sue DHS, agencies after questioned about caravan coverage","Border Stop, Equipment Search or Seizure",,camera: count of 1,,Bing Guan (Independent),,2018-12-29,False,San Diego,California (CA),32.71571,-117.16472,"Bing Guan and Go Nakamura, American photojournalists, were pulled into secondary screening on Dec. 29, 2018, while driving through the San Ysidro point of entry, a border crossing between San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers separated Guan, who was driving his car, and Nakamura and questioned them individually. Guan told the Committee to Protect Journalists that he was questioned by two plainclothes CBP agents, one of whom produced a tear sheet with photographs of people who had been around the caravan. Guan told CPJ that the agents showed him two or three sheets of photo arrays “with between 9 and 12 photos” on each page. These included some photos that appeared like mugshots and others that seemed like surveillance photos.
Guan told The Intercept that he recognized two individuals as anti-migrant activists and thought that a third was associated with Pueblo Sin Fronteras, an immigrant rights group. Guan said that the CPB agents referred to the people in the photos as “instigators.”
Guan was asked to open his camera and show photographs, which he did, reasoning that it would be too dark to identify anyone, according to the account in The Intercept.
Likewise, Nakamura told CPJ that a CBP officer asked him to show his photographs to prove he was a photographer. The officer then showed Nakamura photographs of 20 people and asked whether he had seen them in Mexico. Nakamura said that he was not given an explanation of who the people were.
Two days prior to the secondary screening, Nakamura and Guan were stopped by Mexican municipal police officers who photographed their passports.
A few weeks before he was pulled into secondary screening, Guan had driven through the same San Ysidro port of entry without any issues, he said.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents look toward the Mexican border at the San Ysidro border in San Diego, California in November 2018.
",None,None,None,None,False,1:19-cv-06570,['ONGOING'],Civil,None,False,None,San Ysidro Port of Entry,U.S. citizen,False,False,no,yes,None,None,False,None,[],None,None,None,None,None,None,False,None,,"migrant caravan, student journalism",United States,, 2018-12-05 00:32:19.552582+00:00,2023-10-20 19:07:29.131741+00:00,Arkansas high school suspends student newspaper,https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/arkansas-high-school-suspends-student-newspaper/,2023-10-20 19:07:29.048480+00:00,,,,Other Incident,,,,,,2018-11-27,False,Springdale,Arkansas (AR),36.18674,-94.12881,"A high school student newspaper in Arkansas was suspended, and its adviser threatened with termination, after student journalists published an article about a story questioning the legitimacy of the transfer of football players to another school.
According to BuzzFeed News, Har-Ber High School in Springdale suspended its student paper on Nov. 27, 2018, after it published an investigative story in October.
In a statement, Springdale district superintendent Jim Rollins called The Herald’s story "intentionally negative, demeaning, hurtful and potentially harmful to the students" as well as "divisive and disruptive" to the community, but did not dispute the accuracy of the reporting.
Springdale school district reportedly requested that the paper’s adviser, Karla Sprague, remove the article from the paper’s website. The article was removed, and the school principal suspended the Herald from publishing at all until new guidelines are implemented. The article has been re-published on the Student Press Law Center's website.
BuzzFeed noted that the principal also threatened Sprague with potential termination if the Herald continued to publish.
Buzzfeed described the investigation conducted by the students:
District policy states that students can’t transfer schools because they’re recruited or want to play on a different team. An academic transfer is one of the few valid exceptions to allow a transfer student to play sports.
So the student journalists — the newspaper class has 10 students and is held in second period every day — got to digging.
An anonymous source gave them a pile of FOIA documents from the Arkansas Activities Association showing that five of the players’ parents wrote letters requesting their sons be allowed to play football because they transferred schools for academic reasons.
However, the Herald had also conducted on-the-record interviews with the transfer students themselves, months earlier.
In those interviews, two of the teens said they were transferring to play football.
The 1995 Arkansas Student Publications Act protects the rights of student publications from censorship from school administrators, except under specific circumstances.
“School officials at this point seem to me to have completely thrown up their hands and said, ‘We’re not going to listen to what the law says in our state, and we’re going to do what we want,’” Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel for the Student Press Law Center, told BuzzFeed.
Student journalists at the Herald did not immediately respond to requests to comment.
On Dec. 3, 40/29 News reported that students said that the administration announced that the Herald could be reinstated.
“After continued consideration of the legal landscape, the Springdale School District has concluded that the Har-Ber Herald articles may be reposted,” Rick Schaeffer, the communications director for the Springdale School District, wrote on Dec. 4. “This matter is complex, challenging and has merited thorough review. The social and emotional well-being of all students has been and continues to be a priority of the district.”
Schaeffer declined to comment on whether new guidelines will be implemented that govern publishing in Springdale schools.
Cady Vishniac, former news editor for the student newspaper at the University of Massachusetts Boston, is the only remaining defendant in an ongoing legal case stemming from an article published in 2013.
Mass Media, the university’s independent student newspaper, routinely published information straight from the weekly police blotter, The Boston Globe reported. In March 2013, Mass Media published an entry about an unidentified individual allegedly taking pictures of women on campus without their knowledge or consent under the headline, “Have You Seen This Man?”
The UMass-Boston police released to the newspaper a photo of a man later identified as Jon Butcher. Eventually, after speaking with Butcher and searching his phone images, police closed their investigation into him without filing any charges.
Butcher, a former security engineer in the university’s information technology department, filed a lawsuit against the university, members of the newspaper’s staff and others in January 2014. He argued that the story was defamatory, deliberately hurtful and damaged his relationship with his boss, forcing him to eventually leave his position at the university. Vishniac was the only student editor Butcher was able to serve with court documents, the Globe reported.
Suffolk County Superior Court Judge Douglas Wilkins dismissed all of Butcher’s claims in May 2015, which Butcher appealed in 2017.
A Massachusetts Appeals Court revived only the claims of defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress against Vishniac on Sept. 17, 2018. The three-judge panel concluded that because police never issued a warrant or made an arrest, the information in the police blotter was not protected by fair report privilege.
According to the Digital Media Law Project, fair report privilege provides blanket protections allowing media outlets to report official statements and actions without taking on liability for accusations or charges made therein.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey is representing Vishniac in her appeal before the state’s Supreme Judicial Court, the Globe reported, having deemed the case to be in the public’s interest. The case will likely be heard in the fall of 2019.
In a court brief submitted on behalf of Vishniac on July 1, 2019, Deputy State Solicitor David Kravitz argued that police incident logs are crucial for reporters, serving their communities by informing them about possible crimes and the activities of local law enforcement.
The decisions of the appeals court are “significant errors of law,” Kravitz wrote, “that threaten not only to impose unwarranted litigation costs and perhaps liability on the one remaining individual defendant in this case, but also to chill the press from carrying out its crucial, and constitutionally protected, function.”
If the state’s high court upholds the lower court decision, the defamation case against Vishniac will go to trial.
“I am sure that there are greater issues at stake here,” Vishniac told the Globe. “I just don’t for the life of me understand how it got this far.”
Student journalists at Plainfield High School in Plainfield, Indiana, have been censored by school administrators for their reporting, according to the student co-editor of the school's paper.
Plainfield High School implemented a policy of content review prior to publication after its publication, the Quaker Shaker, published an issue that focused on dating and relationships in October 2017.
The issue, called the Shakedown, was the magazine’s first “special topic” edition, exploring the ins and outs of relationships in high school. It featured polls about the prevalence of sexting and topics like dating violence.
After some parents and school administrators took issue with the content, a new school policy was implemented requiring approval from the principal and an advisory committee before publishing, according to Plainfield High School journalism adviser Michelle Burress.
Co-editor of the Quaker Shaker Anu Nattam said that after the policy was in place, the publication was forced to change the name of their special edition issues to the Shakeout because the school argued that the name Shakedown had mafia connotations.
“We’ve also had to change quotes, and delete quotes for trivial things that make no sense,” Nattam told the Freedom of the Press Foundation in 2018. She also noted that they were asked to change the cover photo of one magazine issue because merely it showed a picture of a clothed posterior.
But it is her responsibility as a student journalist, Nattam said, to report on issues that are relevant to the student body, even if they might be controversial.
Nattam’s adviser Burress said that students have self-censored since the policy was put in place, and they worry about everything they write coming under intense scrutiny. “They are shying away from topics that normally they would not hesitate to cover because they do not want to get shot down,” she said last year. “More than ever this year, students are saying that they do not want to be quoted or pictured in the news magazine or yearbook.”
Nattam agrees. “People need to realize that by limiting press freedom for students, they are limiting their education. That’s what I feel like was done to me and my staff—our education was compromised, because we can’t be put in the same environment as a professional journalist. So, we can’t prepare for a career in journalism if that's what we choose to do.”
Indiana student journalists, including Anu Nattam, center, who holds Plainfield High School's magazine, testified in 2018 in favor of a state bill that would have prohibited schools from encroaching on students’ speech rights.
",None,None,None,None,False,None,[],None,None,False,None,None,None,False,False,None,None,None,None,False,None,None,None,None,None,None,None,None,False,[],The Quaker Shaker,student journalism,,, 2017-10-12 01:00:52.872925+00:00,2024-03-20 20:16:59.044542+00:00,St. Louis police shoot University of Missouri student journalist with pepper balls,https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/st-louis-police-shoot-university-missouri-student-journalist-pepper-balls/,2024-03-20 20:16:58.947192+00:00,,,,Assault,,,,Davis Winborne (Columbia Missourian),,2017-09-17,False,St. Louis,Missouri (MO),38.62727,-90.19789,"Davis Winborne — a photojournalism student at the University of Missouri — reported that he was hit by pepper spray balls, choked, handcuffed and loaded into a van by St. Louis Police while covering a protest in St. Louis, Missouri, on Sept. 17, 2017.
The protest was a response to the acquittal in Sept. of of Jason Stockley, a white former St. Louis police officer who in 2011 fatally shot Anthony Lamar Smith, a black man.
The Columbia Missourian published Winborne’s first-person account of covering the protest.
Winborne writes that he was part of a larger group of photojournalists, many of whom were carrying professional equipment and wearing press badges, who were covering the protest march.
Winborne says that police officers chased the crowd of protesters and journalists and fired beanbag rounds at them. A different group of police officers then drove toward the crowd in an unmarked Jeep and indiscriminately pepper sprayed both protesters and journalists.
When the group of protesters and journalists reached the intersection of Tucker St. and Olive St., Winborne says, a SWAT truck pulled up next to the crowd and officers inside the truck fired pepper spray paintballs at the protesters and journalists.
Winborne reported that he was hit twice by the pepper balls.
According to Winborne, a number of SWAT officers exited the SWAT vehicle and began grabbing journalists and protesters. Winborne writes that a SWAT officer grabbed him by the neck, pushed him into a brick wall and then zip-tied him. Winborne says that an officer removed his respirator and pulled back his helmet, which caused his helmet strap to choke him.
Winborne writes that Chris Burke, a photographer, told the officer, “You need to take off his helmet, he’s choking.” According to Winborne, the officer just said, “I can’t hear you” and walked away.
Winborne says that when he asked one officer whether he was under arrest, the officer replied, “Shut up, motherfucker.” Winborne says that another officer told the group of journalists, “All of you dumbasses are going to jail tonight.”
Winborne says that the group of zip-tied journalists and demonstrators was loaded into the back of a police van and left there for about a half hour before being released.
Winborne said that he was later told that a freelance photographer persuaded the police to release the group on the grounds that they were journalists.
Winborne sharply criticized the behavior of the St. Louis police.
“When police ignore the people who are smashing windows and destroying property in order to focus on handcuffing and berating journalists, it impedes our ability to show the world what is happening,” he wrote in the Missourian.
Davis Winborne
",None,None,None,None,False,None,[],None,None,False,None,None,None,False,False,None,None,law enforcement,no,False,None,[],None,None,None,None,None,None,False,[],,"Black Lives Matter, chemical irritant, court verdict, protest, shot / shot at, student journalism",,, 2017-09-22 19:45:47.991151+00:00,2023-12-08 20:01:05.952269+00:00,University of Texas journalist attacked at immigrant rights protest,https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/university-texas-journalist-attacked-immigrant-rights-protest/,2023-12-08 20:01:05.698689+00:00,,,(2018-08-02 00:00:00+00:00) Protester gets probation after attack on student reporter in Texas,Assault,,,,Chase Karacostas (The Daily Texan),,2017-09-01,False,Austin,Texas (TX),30.26715,-97.74306,"Chase Karacostas — a reporter for The Daily Texan, the newspaper of the University of Texas, Austin — was attacked by a protester while covering a demonstration about immigrant rights on campus on Sept. 1, 2017.
In an interview with the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Karacostas said he had been covering the protest, a demonstration in response to a bill banning sanctuary cities in Texas, for about 20 minutes before he was attacked. He said that a protester knocked his phone into his head while he was conducting an interview. The phone cut his face and forced him to receive treatment at an urgent care clinic.
“I was holding my phone out in front of me while recording, and my assailant came up to me and knocked my phone directly into my face,” Karacostas said.
The Student Press Law Center published audio of the incident and immediate aftermath.
While his attacker re-joined the protest, Karacostas finished his interview and addressed his injury.
“At first I thought it was just a bruise, but then I noticed blood,” he said.
London Gibson, a campus reporter for The Daily Texan who also covered the demonstration, told the Freedom of the Press Foundation that she was interviewing another bystander when the altercation occurred.
“When I turned around, Chase’s face was covered in blood,” she said.
Karacostas said that he walked with his editor, Ellie Breed, to an urgent care center several blocks away, where he received six stitches near his eyebrow.
Karacostas identified the assailant as Eric Nava-Perez, a member of Sanctuary UT, one of the groups that organized the protest. Nava-Perez was arrested by the Austin Police Department and charged with assault. According to the Student Press Law Center, Nava-Perez was held for 12 hours at Travis County Jail and has been banned from entering UT Austin’s campus without permission from the dean.
Nava-Perez did not respond to a request for comment, but Charles Holm, an organizer with Sanctuary UT, criticized Nava-Perez’s arrest. In an interview with the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Holm said that the university’s tactics of policing had contributed to an unsafe atmosphere at the protest and that Nava-Perez felt harassed and defensive due to the presence of police and right-wing bystanders. Jennifer Campbell, another organizer with Sanctuary UT, said that there were multiple police departments present at the protest.
Holm said there was confusion at the protest as to who was a reporter, since multiple bystanders were documenting the demonstration and because the student journalists did not yet have their press badges for the semester. He said that Nava-Perez may have thought that Karacostas was a right wing heckler.
Holm said that, while the altercation was an unfortunate event in which a reporter was regrettably injured, he does not believe it was symbolic of an attack on press freedom.
“There was a general atmosphere of tension that created a chaotic situation,” Holm said.
Karacostas said that, although he was interviewing a bystander who disagreed with the message of the protest, there was no reason to believe he was with the alt-right. Even if he were sympathetic to the alt-right, he added, “it’s still not okay to knock phones into people’s faces and injure them.”
Karacostas was surprised by the randomness of the attack, and in contrast to Holm’s account, both he and Gibson described the atmosphere of the protest leading up to the altercation as relatively calm. Karacostas said that he remains committed to his work as a reporter.
“A lot of blood wasn’t going to stop me from recording,” he said.
Chase Karacostas
",None,None,None,None,False,None,[],None,None,False,None,None,None,False,False,None,None,private individual,yes,False,None,[],None,None,None,None,None,None,False,[],,"protest, student journalism",,, 2017-07-28 06:13:41.529405+00:00,2022-08-04 20:26:02.985965+00:00,Student journalist arrested while covering protest in Minnesota,https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/student-journalist-arrested-while-covering-protest-minnesota/,2022-08-04 20:26:02.924014+00:00,"obstruction: being a public nuisance (charges dropped as of 2017-07-28), rioting: unlawful assembly (charges dropped as of 2017-07-28)",,,Arrest/Criminal Charge,"Journalists among those arrested at Castile rally (http://www.mndaily.com/article/2017/06/journalists-among-those-arrested-at-castile-rally) via Minnesota Daily, 18 Arrested, Including 2 Journalists, During Protests Over Officer’s Acquittal in Philando Castile Killing (http://splinternews.com/18-arrested-including-2-journalists-during-protests-o-1796195652) via Splinter News",,,David Clarey (The Minnesota Daily),,2017-06-17,False,Minneapolis,Minnesota (MN),44.97997,-93.26384,"David Clarey, the campus editor for University of Minnesota student newspaper Minnesota Daily, was arrested along with 18 others after a mass protest following the acquittal of former police officer Jeronimo Yanez in the shooting death of Philando Castile.
In the early evening of June 17, 2017, around 500 protesters obstructed Interstate 94 in both directions. As the protest ended, Minnesota State Patrol and St. Paul police corralled dozens who remained onto an exit ramp.
Clarey was arrested while filming shortly after midnight on June 17, 2017, alongside City Pages reporter Susan Du. The two journalists were held for nine hours and charged with unlawful assembly and being a public nuisance.
The charges were later dropped.
Members of the Minnesota State Patrol arrest protesters on Interstate 94 after a jury found St. Anthony Police Department officer not guilty in the death of Philando Castile in St. Paul, Minnesota, June 16, 2017.
",arrested and released,Minnesota State Patrol,None,None,False,None,[],None,None,False,None,None,None,False,False,None,None,None,None,False,None,[],None,None,None,None,None,None,False,None,,"Black Lives Matter, court verdict, kettle, protest, student journalism",,, 2019-10-23 17:42:58.819197+00:00,2023-07-19 19:04:11.320323+00:00,Puerto Rico Department of Justice executes search warrant against three student media outlets,https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/puerto-rico-department-justice-executes-search-warrant-against-three-student-media-outlets/,2023-07-19 19:04:11.138848+00:00,,LegalOrder object (2),,Subpoena/Legal Order,,,,,,2017-05-05,False,San Juan,Puerto Rico (PR),None,None,"The Puerto Rico Department of Justice issued a search warrant for the Facebook accounts of three university publications on May 5, 2017, seeking information about student protesters who had rallied that April against austerity cuts at a meeting of the University of Puerto Rico's governing board.
Seven of those students will go on trial this November for interrupting the meeting. That interruption was part of a lengthy student-led protest movement against austerity cuts that effectively shut down the majority of the university’s eleven campuses for several months in the spring of 2017.
Superior Court Judge Rafael E. Jimenez-Rivera signed off on the search warrant, which requested Facebook data covering the period between April 26-28, 2017, from three student publications: Pulso Estudiantil, UPR Dialogue, and Centro de Comunicación Estudiantil.
Facebook provided some 1,553 pages of information from Pulso Estudiantil's Facebook account to the Puerto Rico Department of Justice, including private messages, photos, videos, comments and the names of those who commented on the account’s posts. Facebook provided another 1,500 pages from the account of Centro de Comunicación Estudiantil, according to a statement from CCE spokesman Gabriel Casals published by Metro Puerto Rico. Casals went on to demand that the charges against the student protesters be dropped.
The terms of the search warrant prevented Facebook from notifying the impacted parties for 90 days. Neither Facebook nor the Department of Justice notified the student media outlets about the search warrant after that period expired, according to a report from Pulso Estudiantil. Facebook’s policies require such notification, NoticEl reported, citing an attorney from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and so this constitutes a lapse on the part of the social networking site.
Editors at Pulso Estudiantil only learned of the search warrant on Sept. 27, 2019, when a staffer for Denis Márquez Lebrón, a member of the Puerto Rico House of Representatives, contacted them via Facebook about the matter. Lawyers representing the seven students on trial had uncovered the documents in the course of the discovery process, Marisol Nazario, executive director of Pulso Estudiantil, told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.
"We consider this to be a violation of our freedom of the press and our privacy," Nazario said. “If this happened to us, this could happen to any news outlet in Puerto Rico.”
At the time the search warrant was issued, now-Governor Wanda Vázquez Garced was then Puerto Rico’s Secretary of Justice. When asked about the warrant at a press conference in October, Vázquez Garced said the warrant was issued properly as part of a criminal investigation, El Nuevo Dia reported.
A lawyer representing one of the seven students on trial for interrupting the university board meeting plans to challenge the legality of the search warrant, Metro Puerto Rico reported.
Márquez Lebrón introduced a House resolution on Sept. 19, 2019, calling for the body to investigate the matter and weigh in on whether the search warrant was constitutional.
"The House of Representatives must conduct an investigation in order to assess whether public security agencies are complying with the requirements established in the Constitution of Puerto Rico when accessing electronically stored information," the resolution says.
University of Puerto Rico students protest budget cuts in the spring of 2017. In May, the Department of Justice issued warrants for three student publications' Facebook accounts seeking information on student protesters.
",None,None,None,None,False,None,[],None,None,False,None,None,None,False,False,None,None,None,None,False,None,[],Facebook,other,Third-party,warrant,Federal,None,False,None,"Centro de Comunicación Estudiantil, Pulso Estudiantil, UPR Dialogue",student journalism,,,