DURHAM, NC (May 11, 2007) – The president of the National Press Photographers Association and NPPA’s legal general counsel have sent a letter to the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and the head of LAPD’s Internal Affairs objecting to the behavior of LAPD officers last week during a peaceful May Day rally that turned into a melee in McArthur Park, leaving several journalists injured.
“While the entire event is distressful, our specific concern is the manner in which law-abiding photojournalists, who were simply doing their job, were targeted by police officers,” NPPA president Tony Overman and attorney Mickey H. Osterreicher wrote in a letter that was delivered to LAPD chief William J. Bratton today.
News reports say police dressed in riot gear fired more than 200 rounds of rubber and foam bullets and tear gas into the crowd, and police were seen on video clubbing protesters and journalists with batons.
Pedro Sevcec was anchoring the evening news live from the rally for Telemundo when he saw riot police moving toward his news crew, he told the Los Angeles Times. "The next thing I heard was the shotguns," he told the Times. He said police knocked over TV monitors and lights and hit reporters and camera operators with batons. Sevcec said police hit him three times and pointed a riot gun in his face before pushing him out of the park.
Telemundo reporter Carlos Botifoll also told the Times he was holding a microphone and standing in front of a camera, waiting to go live, when police hit him with a baton. Numerous other broadcast and print journalists reported receiving similar treatment from the police.
The injured, including several journalists, were taken to hospitals for treatment. Four employees of KVEA-TV were reported injured, as was a radio reporter from KPCC-FM.
“The type of abuse that news photographers experienced in Los Angeles is not an isolated incident," Overman told News Photographer magazine today. "Police departments across the country suffer from overzealous officers who clearly do not understand the rights of journalists to gather the news. In Los Angeles, the situation has become a systemic problem that now requires a department-wide education program to stop these kinds of abuses of the working media."
In the letter to LA’s top cop, Overman and Osterreicher wrote, “We believe that photographers were specifically targeted because the documentation of the melee could be used as evidence of police misconduct. This is and extremely disturbing reality for a free society.
“As law-abiding citizens, members of the media count on the fact that a police presence at protests keeps them safe. It would be horrible for members of the media to conclude that a police presence is in fact a risk to their safety. We deserve to be protected by the police, not assaulted by them.
“It is news footage and published news photographs that make it possible for you as a chief to investigate and identify the officers who were guilty of abuse in this case. We sincerely hope that you view this as an advantage, and not a hindrance to your job as the top law enforcement officer in the city.
“News photographers carry equipment that makes us easy to identify. News photographers are very obviously media. There is no excuse for physically assaulting a photographer who is not creating a disturbance. Mere presence in a public place does not qualify as a disturbance. Neither does photographing a news event or a melee.
The NPPA letter to Bratton said that the organization doesn’t believe that disciplining a few officers will address the root cause of the problem. “We therefore call on the LAPD to take a systematic approach to ensuring that this will never happen again. Specifically, we believe that every officer in the Los Angeles Police Department needs ongoing training in dealing with the media,” the letter says. “The history of media relations with the LAPD makes it clear to us that there is a department wide lack of understanding about the basic right of the media to gather news, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment and at the very core of what makes our country free.”
“It is your legal responsibility to allow law-abiding members of the media to gather news without threatening, harassing or assaulting them. We insist that you take further steps to keep the media safe,” the letter concludes.
“Similar to NPPA’s successful fight to oppose a photography ban on the New York City subways, the Los Angeles case can serve as an example to other cities and law enforcement agencies around the country that proper education of police officers can allow law abiding activities to safely continue without a need for civil rights and First Amendment rights violations,” Overman said today.
For more information, contact Overman at president@nppa.org.
