Page 1 of 2

When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Mon May 13, 2019 2:41 pm
by highdesert
The banging jolted Bryan Carmody awake. Outside his San Francisco home Friday morning, the longtime journalist saw a throng of police officers with a sledgehammer, trying to break down his front gate. Carmody told the eight to 10 officers he would only let them in with a search warrant. Police confirmed a judge signed off on their barging into his home. Then the officers drew their guns and scoured his residence. When police left, they carted away his notebooks, computers, cameras, phones and even his fiancee’s iPod from her college days. “I knew what they wanted,” Carmody told The Times. “They wanted the name.”

A few weeks before, he said two San Francisco police officers — a sergeant and a lieutenant — knocked on his door and “cordially” asked him to identify the source who shared a confidential police report into the Feb. 22 death of San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi. “Of course, I politely declined,” Carmody said of the visit from police last month. He had the same response Friday. After police came into his home, officers handcuffed him for six hours as they collected his equipment. A receipt certifying his release from custody confirms he was handcuffed from 8:22 a.m. to 1:55 p.m. The search warrant for his home said officers were investigating “stolen or embezzled” property.

It was unclear whether he was handcuffed because of the guns he says he legally owns. Carmody said the guns were locked in a safe, and he said that over the hours-long search, it was evident officers didn’t view him as a threat. At one point, some police took off their bulletproof vests on account of the heat, he said.

While he was shackled, officers got a second warrant to search his newsroom, where police seized a thumb drive, CDs and, inside a safe, the sought-after police report about Adachi’s death. Carmody, 49, said he has not shared the name of his source with anyone, and no markings on the document could be traced to the person who provided it. Fellow journalists in the Bay Area and beyond were outraged by the search of Carmody’s home and office. And the incident provided a new wrinkle into the evolving aftermath of the unexpected death of Adachi, who left behind a legacy of championing civil rights. Initial reports said the 59-year-old public defender had been traveling when he suddenly had a heart attack.

Carmody remembers his goal as a reporter on the story was to figure out where exactly Adachi died. But soon, salacious details emerged that were difficult to confirm. “There were leaks happening all over the place,” he recalled. He ultimately obtained an incident report that detailed Adachi’s final moments. The San Francisco Chronicle also obtained a copy of the report, but not from Carmody.

The document, as reported by KGO-TV in San Francisco, detailed that shortly before his death, Adachi had dinner with a woman named “Caterina” who was not his wife, then returned to an apartment he arranged to use for the weekend. The woman called 911 for emergency medical help, and Adachi was taken to the hospital, where he died. Later that night, officers went to the apartment and found “alcohol, cannabis-infused gummies and syringes believed to have been used by the paramedics,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Photos of the apartment circulated online by KTVU and other outlets. The city medical examiner would later conclude Adachi died of an accidental overdose of cocaine and alcohol. Carmody said he called up his clients and sold the fruits of his news-gathering, which included the police report. He told the Chronicle that he sold the package to three TV stations.

Amid a public mourning, city officials chastised police for allowing the details of a confidential report to end up in the headlines. The police launched an internal investigation into the report’s leaking, which led to Friday’s raid at Carmody’s home. “The citizens and leaders of the City of San Francisco have demanded a complete and thorough investigation into this leak, and this action represents a step in the process of investigating a potential case of obstruction of justice along with the illegal distribution of confidential police material,” police spokesman David Stevenson said in a statement Saturday to The Times.

The city’s public defender’s office, which Adachi once led, said in a statement that “all of the criminal justice and City Hall leaders agree that the release of police reports in this fashion is wrong and we hope that the truth of who leaked the police report will emerge so that it doesn’t happen again.” The FBI was not involved in the search. Katherine Zackel, a spokeswoman for the agency, said two agents were present solely to interview the journalist.

To Carmody and his attorney, the raid smacks of impropriety and an invasion into the work of a professional reporter. “It’s designed to intimidate,” said his lawyer, Thomas Burke. “It’s essentially the confiscation of a newsroom.” Burke, a partner with Davis Wright Tremaine who has previously represented the Los Angeles Times, said under usual circumstances, journalists would receive a subpoena and retain an attorney to help secure protections. That process also is efficient for detectives, he added, because of the time and resources required to search through phones, hard drives, computers and notebooks.

“So much information has nothing to do with the purpose of their investigation,” Burke said. “If you are looking for one piece of information, that’s why you issue a subpoena.” The affidavits that police used to search Carmody’s home were filed under seal, so it’s unclear what investigators told the judge to secure the warrants. Burke said he did not know whether the judges were aware Carmody was even a journalist. The search has brought Carmody’s business, North Bay News, to a halt. As a freelance videographer for nearly three decades, he works through the night to supply the locations, video, images, and on- and off-camera interviews that feed the beast of local TV news. The search warrant documents show police collected check stubs from Fox, Disney and CBS, among others.

He estimates that police hauled off between $30,000 and $40,000 worth of equipment, along with personal photos. Without functional equipment, he cannot work — so his friend Aaron Lee started an online fundraiser to collect donations. Carmody is insisting on protecting his source’s identity. And he swears he never paid the person for the police report. “No,” he said, “not even a cup of coffee.”
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la- ... story.html

Who'd expect this in liberal San Francisco. So something embarrassing becomes an excuse to violate press freedom.

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Mon May 13, 2019 4:33 pm
by max129
I lived in San Francisco for years. The police there are not "liberal". There is a long history of police abuse of power and coverups.

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Mon May 13, 2019 4:34 pm
by senorgrand
max129 wrote: Mon May 13, 2019 4:33 pm I lived in San Francisco for years. The police there are not "liberal". There is a long history of police abuse of power and coverups.
This

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Mon May 13, 2019 5:05 pm
by highdesert
The San Francisco Police Department appears to have violated state and federal laws when its officers searched the San Francisco home of a journalist in an apparent bid to identify a confidential source, 1st Amendment experts said Sunday.The officers carted away phones, computers, tablets and notebooks Friday after using a sledgehammer to try to break through Bryan Carmody’s front gate. Officers also searched his independent news organization, North Bay News, and seized a thumb drive, CDs and a police report about the death of San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi.

Carmody said he suspects the searches were carried out in a bid to identify the confidential source who provided him with the police report. Two investigators visited his home a few weeks ago and “politely” pressed him to disclose the name of his source, but he said he declined. California has a shield law that protects journalists from being held in contempt for refusing to identify their sources, said David Snyder, a lawyer and executive director of the First Amendment Coalition.

“It’s pretty plainly unlawful,” said Snyder, who noted that the statute governing search warrants expressly forbids police from seizing items covered by the shield law. “They are trying to root out the source, and that’s the core of what California’s journalist shield law protects,” he said. “It’s something you’d expect out of an authoritarian regime, not the city of San Francisco.” Carmody is not the only victim of the Police Department’s questionable searches, according to the Society of Professional Journalists’ branch in Northern California.

“An attack on the rights of one journalist is an attack on the rights of all journalists,” the organization’s freedom of information committee said in a statement. “San Francisco’s wrongful actions against Carmody threaten fundamental journalistic freedoms which are vital to a functioning democracy.”A Police Department spokesman defended the searches as part of “a complete and thorough investigation into this leak” and said the raid was “a step in the process of investigating a potential case of obstruction of justice along with the illegal distribution of confidential police material.”

The spokesman, David Stevenson, added that judges signed off on warrants to conduct both searches.San Francisco Superior Court Judge Gail Dekreon approved the warrant to search Carmody’s home on Thursday, and Judge Victor Hwang approved the warrant to seize materials from the office of North Bay News on Friday, according to records provided to The Times.It’s unclear what police told the judges to secure the warrants. The affidavits outlining probable cause for the warrants were sealed by the court.A spokesman for the San Francisco district attorney’s office said Sunday that their prosecutors were not involved in preparing or signing off on the warrants.

The investigation has made Carmody a cause celebre of 1st Amendment advocates and renewed concern about press freedoms in a time when freelancers, contractors and independent journalists work with multiple news outlets across a variety of platforms. Carmody was part of a throng of journalists chasing details about the Feb. 22 death of Adachi, 59. He ultimately obtained an incident report that detailed the public defender’s final moments.

The document, as reported by KGO-TV in San Francisco, said Adachi had dinner with a woman named Caterina, who was not his wife, then returned to an apartment he was using for the weekend. The woman called 911 for emergency medical help, and Adachi was rushed to the hospital. Later that night, officers went to the apartment and found “alcohol, cannabis-infused gummies and syringes believed to have been used by the paramedics,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The city medical examiner would later conclude that Adachi died of an accidental overdose of cocaine and alcohol.

Images of the apartment were circulated online by KTVU, a Fox affiliate in Oakland, as well as KGO-TV. Carmody told the Chronicle that he sold the package, which generally includes documents, video and other reporting material, to three TV stations. Adachi’s widow and city officials chastised San Francisco police for allowing the details of a confidential report to get into the media’s hands.

John Hamasaki, a member of the city’s Police Commission and a defense attorney, said an underlying concern was that the report’s release “was done by Jeff Adachi’s enemies within the Police Department to tarnish his legacy.” As public defender, Adachi cast himself as a police watchdog and champion of civil rights. Hamasaki, who described Adachi as a friend and mentor, said that although he did not appreciate the incident report’s sordid content, he did support outlets like the Chronicle that published details it contained. However, he claimed Carmody’s situation was different. Carmody wasn’t reporting on the document, “but trying to sell it to other news agencies,” Hamasaki argued. “That’s not journalism.”

Lucy Dalglish, an attorney and the dean of the University of Maryland journalism school, compared Carmody to a small broadcast wire service, feeding local news organizations with original reporting. She said the Police Department’s actions turn on whether its investigators strongly believe Carmody broke into a police station or engaged in other illegal behavior in order to steal the report. “But if all this guy did was receive a copy of a police report, then sorry, that’s a bad search,” Dalglish said. “Publishing something because someone handed you a document is not a violation of the law.”

Dalglish, who previously served as director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, pointed to the federal Privacy Protection Act, which prevents law enforcement from searching a newsroom and seizing journalists’ equipment and work product. The statute was passed in 1980 in response to a Supreme Court ruling that dealt a blow to press freedoms. The court ruled that a 1971 search of the Stanford Daily student newspaper's offices by Palo Alto police was constitutional. Following the Supreme Court ruling, California voters enshrined the shield law’s provisions in the state Constitution. “If you want information from a journalist, what you are supposed to do is issue a subpoena,” Dalglish said.

Carmody’s attorney, Thomas Burke, said police have not told him or his client that he is suspected of a crime or that he could face charges. He added that “there’s no dispute” about whether Carmody did anything wrong. “These packages he does — video and the documents that support the video — it’s done every day by freelancers,” said Burke, a partner with the firm Davis Wright Tremaine who has previously represented the Los Angeles Times. “It’s not anything unusual. It’s how the news is done.”
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la- ... story.html
The San Francisco Chronicle also obtained a copy of the report, but not from Carmody.
So why didn't SFPD raid the Chronicle offices to get the name? A real political hot potato.

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Mon May 13, 2019 5:30 pm
by senorgrand
The Chronicle has political connections...and has printing presses. The cops might be corrupt, but they ain't stupid.

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Tue May 14, 2019 1:35 am
by Maccabee
max129 wrote:I lived in San Francisco for years. The police there are not "liberal". There is a long history of police abuse of power and coverups.
Where in the US are police “liberal”?

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Tue May 14, 2019 10:19 am
by TrueTexan
Maccabee wrote: Tue May 14, 2019 1:35 am
max129 wrote:I lived in San Francisco for years. The police there are not "liberal". There is a long history of police abuse of power and coverups.
Where in the US are police “liberal”?
Image

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Tue May 14, 2019 10:30 am
by max129
Maccabee asked:
max129 wrote:
I lived in San Francisco for years. The police there are not "liberal". There is a long history of police abuse of power and coverups.

Where in the US are police “liberal”?
I tend to agree. As Lee Child's 'Jack Reacher' character says "Cops don't drive BMWs and they don't vote Democrat."

I certainly never asserted that any police force is 'Liberal' - simply commenting upon the fact that if someone thinks the San Francisco police are 'Liberal' I have personal, multi-year counter experience.

I lived on Union Street for 6 years. There were actual street cops walking the beat. I talked to them often in coffee shops (it was a friendly neighborhood.). Everyone of them talked like a Republican.

During my time in SF (12 years in total), there were many scandals and coverups. One of the senior cops had a son in the force (who was a thug). His son (a cop) got drunk and beat up a citizen to get his taco (you can't make this stuff up.) This resulted in a multi-year scandal, front page news, intimidation, threats, coverups and in-the-end - nothing. This was more typical than atypical.

I am not anti-police; but I am anti-corrupt police.

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Tue May 14, 2019 10:47 am
by highdesert
I do remember Fajita-gate - Acting Police Chief Alex Fagan, Sr and his son Alex Fagan, Jr who was at the heart of the scandal in 2006. I think the latest was the texting scandal with racist texts, it wasn't just white cops but included Asian and one gay cop. It's a much more diverse department than it was in the 1980s, but changing color and gender doesn't ensure a complete change in culture. If communities don't like it they have to pro-actively change it.

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Tue May 14, 2019 11:05 am
by max129
highdesert said:

I do remember Fajita-gate
Corrected!!! You are right, it was Fajitas (not Tacos :-)

And it went on for years.

They hired a 'reformer' Chief of Police to clean it up.

But here is the real challenge. Very little of modern society resembles 'Mayberry'.

Do I like police that disregard civil liberties? Hell no.

But if someone breaks into your house, you want a police force that is tough, effective and quick to respond.

It is a thankless job. Police are constantly confronted with two realities: (1) They deal with the worst of society often; (2) They get deep scrutiny for any mistakes.

Given the power they wield, the deep scrutiny is understandable; equally understandable is that they feel and act on the defense often - to the point of coverups, blue-silence, and far more.

For a wonderful 100 years, the British police escaped this cycle. But it is now endemic in the UK again. Very few police cultures are 'civil liberty' focused.

Universally, they act more like soldiers in a hostile zone than the glue that holds civil society together.

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Tue May 14, 2019 11:13 am
by featureless
max129 wrote: Tue May 14, 2019 11:05 am It is a thankless job. Police are constantly confronted with two realities: (1) They deal with the worst of society often; (2) They get deep scrutiny for any mistakes.
You couldn't pay me enough to be a big city cop.

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Tue May 14, 2019 3:38 pm
by highdesert
max129 wrote: Tue May 14, 2019 11:05 am
highdesert said:

I do remember Fajita-gate
Corrected!!! You are right, it was Fajitas (not Tacos :-)

And it went on for years.

They hired a 'reformer' Chief of Police to clean it up.

But here is the real challenge. Very little of modern society resembles 'Mayberry'.

Do I like police that disregard civil liberties? Hell no.

But if someone breaks into your house, you want a police force that is tough, effective and quick to respond.

It is a thankless job. Police are constantly confronted with two realities: (1) They deal with the worst of society often; (2) They get deep scrutiny for any mistakes.

Given the power they wield, the deep scrutiny is understandable; equally understandable is that they feel and act on the defense often - to the point of coverups, blue-silence, and far more.

For a wonderful 100 years, the British police escaped this cycle. But it is now endemic in the UK again. Very few police cultures are 'civil liberty' focused.

Universally, they act more like soldiers in a hostile zone than the glue that holds civil society together.
No problem, all I could think of was hyphen "gate", you pricked my memory when you said tacos.

I know cops have a tough job, but they have great power and there need to be strong controls in place. I've always felt that we need to spend more time hiring the best and training them. Physically an 18 year old is in great physical shape for police work, but do they have the maturity. Occupations like cops, social workers, prosecutors and public defenders deal with those in and out of trouble, which doesn't represent all of society and they have to learn to make those distinctions.

One UK cop remarked that in the part of the city where he lived, people respected the laws and each other. He daily drives to the opposite end of the city and people there don't think laws apply to them at all. Another joked that there is a saying "join the force and get a divorce", it's tough on marriages and families. Some UK forces even gave up trying to recruit veteran officers into detective service, most just want to work a shift and go home, no long hours solving cases.

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Thu May 16, 2019 8:43 am
by highdesert
The Guardian goes after SF's liberal hypocritical politicians.
San Francisco politicians pride themselves on defending civil liberties in the face of unprecedented attacks by the White House. But when a Donald Trump-style crackdown on citizens’ rights took place in their own backyard, the city’s Democratic leaders had a different kind of response.

They supported it.
“What happened was unlike anything I’ve seen in quite awhile in this country,” said David Snyder, the executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, a California activist group. “For it to happen in a city that likes to position itself as a champion of civil liberties makes it all the more shocking … Days have passed, and city officials still seem incapable of rising to the level of outrage that I think this incident requires.”
Reactions from some city leaders seemed to misunderstand basic tenets of free press laws. The San Francisco supervisor Sandra Fewer said of Carmody: “If he were obtaining this information to write a story, it still is illegal to obtain a police report unless it has been officially released.” The law, however, protects journalists’ right to publish stories on law enforcement files, and Fewer later released a statement acknowledging she was “not a legal expert”.

The San Francisco mayor, London Breed, who has previously stood up to Trump over attacks on her city, also defended police on Tuesday, saying the SFPD “went through the appropriate legal process to request a search warrant” and adding: “The police need to continue that internal investigation using legal and appropriate means.”

After the raid, the public defender’s office issued a statement that surprised first amendment activists, saying it was “pleased” police were “working to get to the bottom of” the report leak. In the face of backlash, the public defender Manohar Raju, Adachi’s replacement, later released a clarified comment about the raid that said: “Nothing about this statement should be interpreted as condoning specific police tactics in this matter.”

Other officials have tried to avoid the discussion altogether, including progressive leaders who have consistently made headlines for fighting the president’s policies. All 11 elected members of the San Francisco board of supervisors declined to comment to the Guardian or did not immediately respond to inquiries on Wednesday. The governor, state attorney general and San Francisco city attorney also did not respond to questions.
Snyder said the raid was particularly egregious, but was also just one of several recent cases of hypocritical attacks on the press in California. The California attorney general, Xavier Becerra, who has repeatedly filed lawsuits challenging Trump, warned two reporters in February that he considered their possession of a list of police officers convicted of crimes to be a violation of the law – and would not rule out the possibility of legal action against the journalists. A month later, police in Sacramento arrested journalists covering a high-profile protest of police brutality.

These cases, in which journalists were doing work that was clearly within the public interest and shielded by state and federal laws, cast doubt on Democrats’ statements opposing Trump’s “enemy of the people” rhetoric, advocates said.

“Are they really champions of [press freedom] or are they just trying to score political points for their electorate, which is also largely against Trump?” said Snyder. Adachi, who was widely celebrated for his passionate defense of civil liberties, “would’ve been outraged by this”, Snyder added.
Responding to supervisor Fewer’s false claim that a journalist would be breaking the law by obtaining a police report, the San Francisco Chronicle editor, Audrey Cooper, noted: “If the nation’s media waited for material to be officially released, virtually no government scandal or misdeed would ever be exposed.” She added: “If it was illegal to report on unreleased information, nearly all of us at The Chronicle would be in jail.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... journalist

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Thu May 16, 2019 10:42 am
by gator68
max129 wrote:
Do I like police that disregard civil liberties? Hell no.

But if someone breaks into your house, you want a police force that is tough, effective and quick to respond.

.
The old “I luv civil liberties BUT...”
You either believe in rights or you don’t.


Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Thu May 16, 2019 10:45 am
by featureless
gator68 wrote: Thu May 16, 2019 10:42 am
max129 wrote:
Do I like police that disregard civil liberties? Hell no.

But if someone breaks into your house, you want a police force that is tough, effective and quick to respond.

.
The old “I luv civil liberties BUT...”
You either believe in rights or you don’t.
Is it wrong to desire civil liberties and an effective police force? Granted, the effective police force should not be allowed to infringe on those liberties.

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Thu May 16, 2019 11:00 am
by gator68
featureless wrote:
gator68 wrote: Thu May 16, 2019 10:42 am
max129 wrote:
Do I like police that disregard civil liberties? Hell no.

But if someone breaks into your house, you want a police force that is tough, effective and quick to respond.

.
The old “I luv civil liberties BUT...”
You either believe in rights or you don’t.
Is it wrong to desire civil liberties and an effective police force? Granted, the effective police force should not be allowed to infringe on those liberties.
Those are not exclusive!!!
Pretending they are is the problem.
Someone robbed me therefore fajitagate??

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Thu May 16, 2019 11:06 am
by featureless
gator68 wrote: Thu May 16, 2019 11:00 am
Someone robbed me therefore fajitagate??
Now I'm hungry!

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Thu May 16, 2019 11:29 am
by highdesert
It has nothing to do with race/ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, the SF Board of Supervisors (city/county council) is very diverse and the mayor is African-American. Where is the liberal outrage, their silence speaks volumes. The right wing doesn't own hypocrisy.
https://sfbos.org/inauguration

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Thu May 16, 2019 12:02 pm
by featureless
highdesert wrote: Thu May 16, 2019 11:29 am The right wing doesn't own hypocrisy.
Boy is that the truth!

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Thu May 16, 2019 4:27 pm
by highdesert
As our Editor in Chief [SF Chronicle] Audrey Cooper so aptly put it, “If you believe only the far right relishes bashing the press to distract from core issues, let me introduce you to San Francisco City Hall.”
The raid was probably illegal under California’s Shield Law, which requires law enforcement to get a subpoena — not a search warrant, as was done here — when seeking unpublished material, as our editorial points out. The whole messy episode is all the more disturbing in view of the acquiescence of leading politicians from Mayor London Breed on down.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/art ... 849066.php

SF Chronicle Editorial:
The city leadership’s tacit acquiescence in a heavy-handed and likely illegal police raid on a freelance journalist is highly disturbing. Perhaps Mayor London Breed and most of the supervisors believe the end justifies the means, First Amendment be damned. Perhaps they feel a bit guilty, even complicit, in pressuring Police Chief Bill Scott to get to the bottom of the leak of a police report containing sordid details surrounding the Feb. 22 death of Public Defender Jeff Adachi.

Or perhaps they’re simply clueless about the concept of a free press and the right of journalists to protect their sources.

Perhaps they should read California’s Shield Law, which makes plain that law enforcement seeking a journalist’s unpublished information should do so through a subpoena — giving the journalist a chance to challenge a request — rather than a search warrant. After the raid, the mayor should have hauled the chief into her office and ordered him to immediately return the computers, notes and other items to freelancer Bryan Carmody. Instead she defended the raid.

At least two supervisors, Aaron Peskin and Hillary Ronen, have been willing to take stands for press freedom. “I’m horrified by this whole incident,” Peskin said Wednesday. “It is mind-boggling. There are sacrosanct rules in our society and freedom of the press is one of them. ... That this happened in San Francisco is unfathomable to me.”

Peskin said he has been “blown away” by the way some people have rationalized the raid because the leakage of the report in question was such an obvious attempt to smear Adachi. The state’s only elected public defender’s fearlessness, effectiveness — and willingness to call out police misconduct — made him a legion of enemies in law enforcement. Peskin also scoffed at the apologists’ absurd argument that Carmody was not a journalist simply because he did not write stories.

It’s apparent that someone in Scott’s ranks should be fired if not prosecuted. But that does not absolve his responsibility to pursue the leak the right way, the legal way. And San Francisco politicians’ outrage over the mistreatment of their late friend and colleague does not forgive their unwillingness to defend the First Amendment in their city.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/edi ... psid=4XqPM

Good to see that at least two of the 11 member SF City/County Board of Supervisors are outraged at this action by SFPD and two SF superior court judges who signed the warrants.

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Thu May 16, 2019 5:23 pm
by senorgrand
SF has so many LINOs, its insane.

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Wed May 22, 2019 3:57 pm
by senorgrand

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Wed May 22, 2019 4:38 pm
by wooglin
"They went after him because he's all by himself," Wheaton said. "And the fact that he sells the materials that he packages. He puts together a journalism report including documents and sells it. That's what journalism is."
I’m not entirely convinced that is what journalism is. I haven’t actually found a legal definition of journalist or reporter either.

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Wed May 22, 2019 4:52 pm
by highdesert
Thanks SG, good info.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Samuel Feng set dates to hear requests by media organizations to unseal affidavits and revoke search warrants signed by judges.
The First Amendment Coalition wants the judge to unseal the police department's applications for two search warrants, which would show whether officers informed judges that Carmody is a journalist.
Hope the warrants are unsealed, as we recall from the botched drug raid in Houston, cops lie on warrant requests. And two judges just signed them without asking enough questions?

Re: When a reporter wouldn't betray his source, cops came with guns and a sledgehammer

Posted: Wed May 22, 2019 7:52 pm
by Mustang
highdesert wrote: Thu May 16, 2019 11:29 am It has nothing to do with race/ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, the SF Board of Supervisors (city/county council) is very diverse and the mayor is African-American. Where is the liberal outrage, their silence speaks volumes. The right wing doesn't own hypocrisy.
https://sfbos.org/inauguration
This^^

The raid wasn't done in a vacuum by some rogue elements of the SFPD. This was supported by most of the liberal SF political establishment, who only now are starting to flip flop on their support, because of the huge blow back the city is getting for violations of the press shield law.