Despite Commissioner Kelly's pre-Thanksgiving reminder to the rank-and-file that NYPD is obligated to "cooperate with media representatives acting in a news-gathering capacity
at the scene of police incidents," there have been a number of recent instances of police officers inexplicably impeding working journalists at police lines.
Among the latest are the forceful ejection from the
World Financial Center plaza of a credentialed photographer who was shooting the December 13th arrests there of
an "Occupy Wall Street" contingent. Earlier in the month, officers from the
40th Precinct in the Bronx surrounded and arrested a young writer who was questioning them for a
story about the "Occupy" movement in boroughs outside Manhattan.
Details of those incidents and reports of numerous similar incidents of suppressive police behavior are being collected and posted on the New York Press Club's website. The page is
intended as a reference resource of local and national reporting on what many view as an escalating disregard of First Amendment guarantees by police agencies locally and around
the nation.
Public Information Office Unresponsive
In addition to problems in the field, the New York Press Club is receiving an increasing number of complaints from working journalists that NYPD and its
Office of
Public Information are not honoring the terms of a 2010 agreement to systemitize the press credentialing process. In settlement of a lawsuit filed on constitutional grounds,
NYPD formally agreed last year to replace its often arbitrary credentialing process with one that is codified. But last week,
GOTHAMIST, one of the City's oldest hyperlocal
news and commentary sites published a well-documented story about its four year struggle to obtain NYPD credentials for several reporters, so far unsuccessfully, despite scrupulously
following NYPD's published procedures. Gothamist, the Press Club is hearing, is not alone in failing to get the full-attention and timely cooperation of NYPD's credentialing staff.
The New York Press Club and a number of other organizations representing journalists in New York City have formed the
Coalition for the First Amendment to
monitor police-press relations and to document and protest tactics and behavior that contravene First Amendment protections. The Coalition now numbers 13 press organizations with
the recent additions of the
New York Association of Black Journalists and the
National Writers Union/UAW Local 1981.
Visit the Coalition For the First Amendment resource page.
