I tweeted @SFPD yesterday my disgust at their behavior. I feel it's all that twitter is good for these days, registering displeasure at companies and agencies. Will they do anything about it? Likely not, but if enough people show anger at them, maybe the Mayor will fire the police chief.
yeah i don't really understand this. Like why do you need a whole squad and feds to break down his door with a battering ram for a single "leaked" document. Could have just knocked and said they had a warrant.
There are hundreds to thousands of abuses of law enforcement power like this per year where simple warrant serving is executed by a swat team in order to justify the budget of the swat team.
If you surprise him by suddenly breaking down his door, there's a chance he'll make the wrong gesture. Then you get to kill him saying you felt threatened.
You get far fewer angry letters when the barrier for entry is that the writer has to pay for a stamp and an envelope.
The thing about a letter is, you've got 30-90 minutes while you write it to reconsider what you're writing. And if there's a 50p + an envelope + paper cost to that, maybe you think more carefully about what you're trying to say.
With a 500 character limit and a "quick fire, gotta reply fast" push, most interactions are utter crap.
Email (at least to me) is the sort-of-okay middle ground.
So is the vast majority of public documents. That being said, having a record of actions, issues and opinions can be quite useful as these records age.
Not defending the police, but how do you establish status as a freelance journalist and does that convey protections that California law provides regular journalist, those in the direct employ of a news organization.
by many measures we all are in this day and age. does it require having successfully sold a story to an established news organization?
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the fact that they sold to well known publication indicates that the material was newsworthy.
I don't agree with raiding a journalist at all (in general), but more importantly I feel the sledge hammer + guns approach is clearly intended to be intimidating and has no place in this kind of warrant. In essence I have more of a problem with the egregious use of weapons and violence on the part of police enforcing a warrant for a non-violent, and non-weapon related crime than I do specifically the attack on journalism.
Obviously the attack on journalism is bad, but in general the intimidation by police is a more widespread problem. Basically the problem for real journalism is the fact that a warrant was issued on a journalist in the first place (think pentagon papers as example of truth to power).
