Reporters and legal observers who were detained or arrested by the Los Angeles Police Department during a mass arrest of protesters in Echo Park on Thursday night were sounding alarms on Friday – accusing the LAPD of ignoring its legitimate monitoring role of such events on the spot.
They also accused the LAPD of issuing confused guidelines and trying to force members of the media into a designated observation area that would not allow them to see the protest or the arrests that followed.
While some detained reporters and observers were released without being arrested, others – including reporters from less established media brands – were detained for hours and then formally charged, raising additional questions about which police to choose and which means to recognize as legitimate.
“It’s an absurd conflict of interest,” said Jonathan Peltz, who was arrested while covering events for Knock LA, a nonprofit newsroom affiliated with the ground-breaking activist group Ground Game LA. “It must be widely accepted that [police] it is not people who decide who is a journalist or where the media pen is ”.
Julian Andrews, a TV cameraman who was on the field with Spectrum News reporter Kate Cagle and another colleague, said the actions of the LAPD – which took Cagle away and tied his hands minutes before a planned live scene – were “unbelievable” “.
“They knew she was a reporter. We were videographers trying to make a story. We were not causing any disruption, ”said Andrews. “I was honestly shocked. I couldn’t believe it. “
Cagle was later released without arrest, as was James Queally, a reporter for The Times who was also detained while covering the protest. I called the experience “maddening”.
Peltz said at one point that he was sitting next to Queally, the two of them in zip ties, lamenting the actions of the LAPD.
“What is that, arresting a journalist’s night?” Queally joked.
The LAPD said on Friday that the police had made “extraordinary efforts” to allow the protest to take place peacefully, but in the end arrested 182 people after declaring the meeting near Lemoyne Street and Park Avenue illegal and issuing a dispersal order. . They cited the crowd’s alleged use of strobe lights as the reason for the order, saying that attempts to remove only those responsible for the lights were rejected by the crowd.
“Once the decision was made to start the arrests, the crowd was surrounded and taken individually into custody without incidence of force or injury,” said the LAPD. He also said that two policemen suffered minor injuries and that the policemen fired 10 projectiles of hard foam or bean bag during the protest “in response to projectiles thrown at the policemen”
The department said that three people among the detainees identified themselves as members of the media, while others identified themselves as legal observers of the National Lawyers Guild, and that these people were “released on the spot without further action”.
However, not everyone who claimed to be a reporter was released. Among those who went to prison were Peltz and his colleague from Knock LA, Kate Gallagher.
Peltz said he heard the LAPD make an announcement about the media, but he couldn’t hear it entirely. It looked like they were telling the media to leave, which didn’t seem legitimate to him, he said.
“Nobody knows how to handle this. It doesn’t look cool. I never heard that in another protest, ”he said. “There seems to be a willingness on the part of the police force to have no consistent rules or laws for people to follow, but their excuse for arresting people is that they were not following the rules.”
As soon as Peltz was arrested, he said he told the police it was the press, but was ignored.
“You just had a feeling they didn’t believe you or it didn’t really matter,” he said. When he later found out that reporters with credentials issued by the LAPD from major media outlets were released, he said he was frustrated.
“Why are they providing these credentials?” he said of the police. “Why are they deciding, especially when they are being written?”
Peltz editor Liam Fitzpatrick said he spent a few frantic hours trying to find out where Peltz and Gallagher were taken, which turned out to be the Metropolitan Detention Center in the city center.
“I called the Metro Detention Center asking if they had been charged, and whatever it was, they gave me that police thing like, ‘Well, they’re not in the system yet, so we can’t say where they are,’” Fitzpatrick said. “We couldn’t find where someone was. We called and left messages for media relations officers. I didn’t hear anything. “
In a statement, the National Lawyers Guild denounced the LAPD’s actions, including the detention of its members and members of the media, as “illegal and shameful” and a reflection of tactics that have been the subject of legal agreements against the department in the past.
He did not say how many of his members were detained, but asked city attorney Mike Feuer to drop all charges arising from the protest.
Southern California’s ACLU condemned the LAPD’s actions as a misguided attempt to hide from scrutiny the “militarized action” that its officers were taking to clean Lake Echo Park.
“Mass arrests of protesters, legal observers and journalists will not prevent the city’s brutal and ill-conceived actions from being known,” said the ACLU. “The city leaders who approved this approach must be held accountable.”
Andrews, the TV cameraman who filmed his Spectrum News colleague Kate Cagle, being pulled out of the crowd by police officers, said he questions what motivated the police to detain her, even if they eventually let her go.
Andrews said Cagle told him to start recording while she was preparing for the live shot, in case she was arrested. He said he laughed in response, finding the idea ridiculous, but started recording anyway.
Then it happened. Cagle, right in the frame of her camera, was approached by several policemen, grabbed and pulled, although it was absolutely clear that she was a reporter, Andrews said.
“They came after her, right when she was outdoors,” he said. “I can not believe.”