LAPD’s sanitized Echo Park report doesn’t tell the whole story

The authors of the Los Angeles Police Department’s after-action report about the March 2021 unrest in Echo Park failed to interview multiple journalists who were detained for doing their jobs. As such, this sanitized account cannot be deemed thorough and should be rejected. 

Journalists are workers. When they cover any protest or police action, they are there on the job. The report singles out Media Guild of the West member James Queally, a Los Angeles Times reporter, and implies that he was to blame for his own detention because he was present. This is incorrect. 

Queally was on assignment for his employer, The Times, and identified himself to officers on scene as soon as it was safe to do so. The department should have released him and other detained journalists as soon as it recognized their professional credentials instead of waiting for an outcry by our union and others. Instead, this report declares that “the system that was utilized was ultimately successful” and pats the department on the back for not pursuing charges against the journalists it zip-tied, which is the lowest possible bar for a free press in a democracy.

The public should be disturbed by the Los Angeles Police Department’s repeated insistence in this report that it has the right to arrest journalists standing in public spaces whenever it decides that the First Amendment has become inconvenient. We urge state lawmakers and Gov. Newsom to enact SB 98 to recognize the rightful role of the press in documenting protests without police interference.

--Executive Committee of Media Guild of the West

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Media Guild of the West is a local of the NewsGuild-CWA that represents unionized journalists at the Los Angeles Times and several other newsrooms in Southern California, Arizona and Texas. In April, the Guild’s membership voted 94% to 6% to support SB 98 as introduced.