Police intimidation of journalists is a political statement

Interesting and disturbing:

On Sunday night, three days after citizens of Ferguson marched alongside Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson, in gratitude for Johnson taking over the heavy-handed police presence, and mere hours after Johnson gave an emotional speech apologizing for the police violence and promising its end, the savior of Ferguson ordered three journalists arrested for witnessing an apparently unprompted police crackdown on protesters.

Shortly after police in Ferguson lobbed tear gas and fired high-tech noise cannons at protesters, three reporters from major outlets attempted to walk down the street to talk to the protesters. Police approached them and ordered them to leave the area. Though the police had no legal authority to do this — it was a public street with no imminent danger — the reporters, one of them a veteran war correspondent, had perhaps heard enough reports of police in Ferguson intimidating and arresting journalists to know they should leave.

“Capt Johnson said walk away or be arrested. I started walking away. They followed and arrested us,” one of the reporters, Robert Klemko of Sports Illustrated, tweeted. Another of the reporters posted a video clip showing Johnson ordering that the journalists be arrested and cuffed.

Their zip-cord cuffs were cut minutes later, but Johnson’s arrests were nonetheless a success. The three reporters, and others in the area, now understood that crossing the police’s ever-tightening list of restrictions on journalists, stated and unstated, no matter how arbitrary or unlawful, came with personal, bodily risk. And the police under Johnson’s command saw very clearly how they were to treat the media.

…There are political ramifications too clear and powerful to be dismissed as incidental, just as there are with the police’s decision to demonstrate as much force as possible, to present themselves as an occupying army that sees the Ferguson community as an enemy to be suppressed.

By forcing reporters off of streets with curfews, assaulting or threatening them when they wander out of tiny designated zones, and arresting them seemingly arbitrarily, police are doing much more than suppressing media coverage of their crackdowns. The police are signaling that they exercise total control over every inch of public space in Ferguson and believe they have the authority to treat people in that space however they wish. That message comes through clearly not just to the reporters, but to their vast audiences in Ferguson and beyond it.

Journalists can at times be the canary in the coal mine for situations when basic order and public safety have broken down. It is unfair and unjust that a reporter from a well-known outlet can expect better treatment, and a far greater degree of physical security, than can other people in just about any situation in America or abroad. So if this is how police in Ferguson are treating journalists, just imagine how they treat local residents.

When a police officer is willing to run up to a video journalist and shout, “Get the fuck out of here … or you’re getting shot with this,” knowing this will be heard by the journalist’s viewers, you have to wonder how that officer behaves when the cameras aren’t running, how he talks to the local citizens he is supposed to be protecting.

That is what makes Ferguson’s treatment of journalists truly alarming. It is part and parcel of the police’s treatment of regular citizens, an extension of their militarized tactics and their practice of treating the community as a hostile force to be controlled. When we see police cracking down on journalists, we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg of Ferguson police abuses, and that should help us understand why Ferguson’s residents are protesting.