Journalists must be allowed to do their jobs safely in Lancaster County and across the US [editorial]

 Via Lancaster Online

October 27, 2024

Lancaster Safety Coalition footage shows a Lancaster city police officer pushing a photojournalist to the ground during protests Sunday, Oct. 20, in Penn Square, near the Lancaster County Convention Center, where Donald Trump was speaking.

Lancaster Safety Coalition

THE ISSUE

“A Lancaster city police officer pushed a photojournalist to the ground (last) Sunday afternoon, causing her to hit her head on the street during a protest of former President Donald Trump’s town hall event at Lancaster County Convention Center,” LNP | LancasterOnline reported. Susan Stava, a New York City-based freelance photographer, was working to capture the scene in Lancaster city’s Penn Square, where local Democrats were protesting Trump’s visit. Video shows a Lancaster city police officer firmly pushing Stava, causing her to fall backward onto the road. Stava said she landed on her camera bag, and a lens was broken.

It took the Lancaster City Bureau of Police all of three days to “investigate” the incident in which a freelance photojournalist was pushed to the ground by a city police officer. Its conclusion: The officer “followed the law including the Bureau’s training, policies, and procedures.”

--Click for full editorial

"Journalists see journalism not merely as a job, but as a calling that’s critical to the health of a democracy. Elected officials should not actively undermine their safety — or stay silent about an incident in which a journalist faced harm."

At protests, police are increasingly arresting members of the press—especially those with cameras.

 

Via Columbia Journalism Review

October 7, 2024

Since the violence of last October 7—as the conflict between Israel and Palestine has grown deadlier, and spread more widely in the Middle East—it has also been, according to the US Press Freedom Tracker, a nonpartisan database of press freedom violations, a “protest year.” The visual journalists who cover demonstrations across America—photographers, videographers—are at the center of the action. “We have to get creative, go on the floor, shoot through cops’ legs, just to get that visual,” Madison Swart—a photojournalist in New York whose work has been published in Out and Cosmopolitan, among other places—told me. In May, while covering a pro-Palestinian protest, Swart was briefly detained by police officers—one of forty-three journalists who have been arrested in the past year, triple the previous number. According to Stephanie Sugars, a reporter for the US Press Freedom Tracker, “it has felt that the predominant number of incidents, at least since the protests started, are against people who are documenting visually in some capacity.”

--full article here.