Law enforcement officers in Kansas raided the office of a local newspaper and a journalist’s home on Friday, prompting outrage over what First Amendment experts are calling a likely violation of federal law.
The police department in Marion, Kansas — a town of about 2,000 — raided the Marion County Record under a search warrant signed by a county judge. Officers confiscated computers, cellphones, reporting materials and other items essential to the weekly paper’s operations.
Stories about police abusing their authority and breaking the law have become like stories about mass shootings. They happen constantly, everyone wrings their hands, but no one is willing to actually do anything about the problem.
This is probably one of the most important (legally and politically speaking) events to happen in the U.S. this year, but I feel like it will not get very much attention at all and might set a very dangerous precedent going into the next decade.
And the 98 year old woman whose house they raided just died on Saturday.
Local authorities said they were investigating the newsroom for “identity theft,” according to the warrant. The raid was linked to alleged violations of a local restaurant owner’s privacy, when journalists obtained information about her driving record.
Oberlander said exceptions to the Privacy Protection Act are “important but very limited.” One such exception allows authorities to raid a newsroom if the journalists themselves are suspected to be involved in the crime at hand. In a statement sent to NPR, Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody cited this exception to justify his department’s raid of the Marion County Record.
However
Several media law experts told NPR the raid appears to be a violation of federal law, which protects journalists from this type of action.
Meyer, the Marion County Record’s publisher, said local restaurateur Kari Newell accused the paper of illegally obtaining drunk-driving records about her.
But the paper, Meyer said, received this information about Newell from a separate source, independently verified it on the Kansas Department of Revenue’s Division of Vehicles website — and decided not to publish it. The paper instead opted to notify local police.
Here’s their justification - they found out about a business owner’s drunk driving records, and told the police. The police decided this was “identity theft”.
In China, NPR would suffer a few arrests and jailings just for posting this article, but a lot of uneducated weirdos out there still think “ThE uS iS wOrSe”
arrests and jailings
It didn’t happen to NPR, but even irrelevant pieces of technology were stolen from a smaller publication’s journalists using tactics that appear illegal (skirting the subpoena requirement by accusing them of identity theft). The raid went on for hours, and Joan Meyer DIED as a direct result of the trauma. She wasn’t arrested or jailed, she was terrorized to such a degree that it left her dead.
This isn’t the time or place to make statements like “Hey, at least it’s not as bad as China”, because for some people like Joan Meyer, it was just as bad. We need to start focusing on what we can do stop the police from terrorizing people they dislike, or it might be NPR next.
Ax grinding much?
