When reporters hit the streets to cover the mass anti-deportation protests that erupted in Los Angeles in June, they expected California law to be on their side.
The state’s press protections are among the strongest in the nation. At least on paper.
On the ground, though, law enforcement routinely ignored them.
Authorities — from federal agents to Los Angeles Police Department officers and LA County sheriff’s deputies — unleashed crowd-control weapons indiscriminately and with shocking force.
Journalists were shoved, clubbed, tear-gassed, shot with projectiles and zip-tied. They were detained, searched and blocked from reporting — even after a federal judge ordered the violations to halt during ongoing litigation.
“LAPD sort of threw the gauntlet down there to say, ‘We don’t care about the law. We are above the law,’” said Los Angeles Press Club press rights chair Adam Rose.
Rose, who has since joined the advocacy staff of Freedom of the Press Foundation, of which the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker is a project, had lobbied for the protections the officers violated.
Those protections were signed into law four years ago, in October 2021, after a wave of protests exposed gaps in the rights afforded to journalists on the ground. At the time, state law allowed reporters to cover disasters, but not protests, once police declared an unlawful assembly.
The new law, California Penal Code 409.7, meant to fix that. It bars police from arresting or interfering with journalists covering protests and largely shields them from dispersal orders.
The new legislation passed with aspirations to protect reporters in the field. But when put to the test this summer, police openly defied it.
Of the 118 press freedom violations documented by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker in California this summer, all but five were at the hands of law enforcement, as were nearly every one of the 86 assaults.