A police raid of a Kansas newsroom raises alarms about violations of press freedom

News@lemmy.world – 439 points – 1 years ago

Law enforcement officers in Kansas raided the office of a local newspaper and a journalist's home on Friday, prompting outrage over what First Amendment experts are calling a likely violation of federal law.

The police department in Marion, Kansas — a town of about 2,000 — raided the Marion County Record under a search warrant signed by a county judge. Officers confiscated computers, cellphones, reporting materials and other items essential to the weekly paper's operations.

This is probably one of the most important (legally and politically speaking) events to happen in the U.S. this year, but I feel like it will not get very much attention at all and might set a very dangerous precedent going into the next decade.

And the 98 year old woman whose house they raided just died on Saturday.

Did you mean “razed”?

And yes, it’s awful.

They likely meant “raided”

Oh, yes you are probably right. My mistake.

No, they meant raided.

Thank you. Pre-coffee reading comprehension issues here.

Stories about police abusing their authority and breaking the law have become like stories about mass shootings. They happen constantly, everyone wrings their hands, but no one is willing to actually do anything about the problem.

It's what the poorly titled "Defund the Police" movement was/is about. The police serve no other purpose than to harass people and enforce the will of rich and politicians. So they need to be vastly scaled back.

So they need to be vastly scaled back.

Unfortunately, we elected a president who pledged to raise their funding. They're not only corrupt, violent, and out of control, they're getting rewarded for it.

Local authorities said they were investigating the newsroom for "identity theft," according to the warrant. The raid was linked to alleged violations of a local restaurant owner's privacy, when journalists obtained information about her driving record.

Oberlander said exceptions to the Privacy Protection Act are "important but very limited." One such exception allows authorities to raid a newsroom if the journalists themselves are suspected to be involved in the crime at hand. In a statement sent to NPR, Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody cited this exception to justify his department's raid of the Marion County Record.

However

Several media law experts told NPR the raid appears to be a violation of federal law, which protects journalists from this type of action.

Meyer, the Marion County Record's publisher, said local restaurateur Kari Newell accused the paper of illegally obtaining drunk-driving records about her.

But the paper, Meyer said, received this information about Newell from a separate source, independently verified it on the Kansas Department of Revenue's Division of Vehicles website — and decided not to publish it. The paper instead opted to notify local police.

Here’s their justification - they found out about a business owner’s drunk driving records, and told the police. The police decided this was “identity theft”.

A bit of cherry picking there

But Oberlander said that exception doesn't apply when the alleged crime is connected to newsgathering — which appears to be the case in Marion.

While this is otherwise pretty great reporting, I found this sentence incredibly weird

Without the devices, she was left unable to stream shows onto her TV or use devices if she needed help, the newspaper said.

One of those things is significantly more important than the other, since she died shortly after this raid. Just a weird sentence overall.

Not that weird if we're talking about the quality of life of a 98 year old woman. "Healthy" at that age might look like spending a great deal of time in your favorite chair watching your favorite shows on the television. After almost a century on this planet, you get a little tired.

That's a good point! Hadn't considered it.

"If I can't watch Andy Griffith this life ain't worth livin."

In America, there’s big city police. Then there is rural county police. The latter have the potential to get away with so much blatant violation of local/state/federal law. Checks and balances of power is nonexistent.

Doesn’t help that journalists and local newspapers have either vacated the region or bought by some VC/PE or larger media organization which guts the IJ division

Yeah there's no corruption with big city police, is there? Internal investigations always come up with accurate conclusions and big city police are always held accountable for their actions.

Why can't rural police be as corrupt or more, with even less oversight? How does that make city police not corrupt? What is the internal investigation process for rural cops, especially at the county sherrif level?

Reading comprehension isn't your strong suit, is it? At no point did they say big city police weren't corrupt. They just said that small town cops have the potential to be so much more corrupt.

In China, NPR would suffer a few arrests and jailings just for posting this article, but a lot of uneducated weirdos out there still think "ThE uS iS wOrSe"

Ax grinding much?

arrests and jailings

It didn't happen to NPR, but even irrelevant pieces of technology were stolen from a smaller publication's journalists using tactics that appear illegal (skirting the subpoena requirement by accusing them of identity theft). The raid went on for hours, and Joan Meyer DIED as a direct result of the trauma. She wasn't arrested or jailed, she was terrorized to such a degree that it left her dead.

This isn't the time or place to make statements like "Hey, at least it's not as bad as China", because for some people like Joan Meyer, it was just as bad. We need to start focusing on what we can do stop the police from terrorizing people they dislike, or it might be NPR next.