Bratton: LAPD attacks on reporters, protestors "worst in 37 years"

More details are coming out about the Los Angeles Police Department's clash with demonstrators and reporters this Tuesday at an immigration reform rally.

Above: Carl Stein, longtime cameraman for Los Angeles television station KCAL, struggling and in pain on the ground after having been beaten by LAPD officers.

Anonymous friend of Carl Stein tells BoingBoing, "He spoke to the photo editor at [one major US newspaper which ran this photo] the day of the incident and explained that the photo depicted the cops beating him to the ground. Interestingly, when the paper went to press, the caption reads that the cops are helping him to get up. WTF?"

LA-based public radio station KPCC produced a report about the incident earlier this week. KPCC reporter Patricia Nazario was among the journalists assaulted by police at the scene. This page contains audio of her describing how she was hit by police officers with a baton, after she identified herself as a reporter: Link (direct link to her testimony is on right hand side, about halfway down page).

Here is another first-person account of the incident by LA Times blogger and writer Jill Leovy: Link. From the sound of this and other reports I've heard, some of the self-proclaimed "citizen journalists" on the scene were behaving like jerks, and may have contributed to the escalation:

The lingerers were a mix of protesters and reporters. Some were reporters from established news organizations watching or recording what police were doing, and some were self-styled grassroots reporters — protesters with cameras — some of whom were both filming officers closely and yelling challenges at them. At least three men in this mixed group lingered long enough to be caught by the advancing line of officers and they were batoned. They received one or two baton strokes each.

The arguments continued as police advanced. The challengers were resistant, but appeared nonviolent. They were mostly people who quarreled with individual officers while backing away from the advancing line. One man briefly laid down on his back in front of the police. The people throwing things, among them the plastic bottle lobber, appeared to be farther back in the retreating crowd.

(…)At a press conference with Chief Bratton about 9 Tuesday night at the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Park View, tensions between the informal press and the formal press bubbled over. As the chief spoke, with Assistant Chief Earl Paysinger at his side, at least 40 people surrounded him, with six or seven squatting on the ground in front to hear better. About half of the group appeared not to be official members of the press corps, but rather, protesters and self-appointed journalists affiliated with the protesters. When it came time to call out questions — often a competitive moment among reporters from competing news agencies — the protesters held their own.

(…)
A large man in front of the chief to his right, who had been heckling with words of skepticism throughout the event, repeatedly asked in a loud voice whether the chief planned to appoint a civilian panel to investigate the incident. He interrupted reporters. Tempers flared. Dave Clark, a well-known broadcast journalist with KCAL 9 and CBS 2, admonished him to be quiet. "We are trying to work here!" Clark said.

At one point, Bratton also asked this man to be quiet. The press conference was being held for the benefit of the official media, he said. The man responded by insisting he was a "citizen journalist," but then backed down…

LAPD chief Bill Bratton is quoted in this NYT article as saying the episode is the worst such incident he has "encountered in 37 years" in law enforcement.
Snip:

For the past two days, local television viewers have seen video of Christina Gonzalez, a reporter for the Fox News affiliate, KTTV Channel 11, being repeatedly shoved by an officer with a baton. When Ms. Gonzalez knelt to help a camerawoman, Patti Ballaz, whom the police had pushed to the ground, an officer angrily threatened Ms. Gonzalez with arrest and then grabbed her shoulders, spinning her abruptly to the side.

“You can’t do that!” Ms. Gonzalez cried out. “You know that!”

Ms. Ballaz suffered a hairline fracture of a wrist.

Another reporter, Patricia Nazario from KPCC-FM, a National Public Radio affiliate here, said she was talking to her editor on her cellphone when an officer struck her in the back with a baton.

Ms. Nazario said she faced the officer and told him she was a reporter. He struck her again with the baton on her left thigh, she said.

“It happened so fast and I was on the ground,” she said. “It was like they were robots, on autopilot.”

On a post to Joi Ito's mail list, Sasha Costanza-Chock writes:

LAPD brutally attacked thousands
of families celebrating international workers' day in downtown macarthur
park, using rubber bullets, batons, motorcycles and chemical spray. They
even attacked several members of the media, including Fox News and
Telemundo correspondents! It was so ludicrous that they are no longer
even attempting to spin it in the standard way (ie, 'we used controlled
nonlethal force against a few troublemakers). They have abandoned that
line and even the chief (bratton) has admitted that it got out of hand.

I was there to support the event and to play music with my band fosforo.
We were literally on the soundstage playing when the police attacked
without clear warning. I happened to have a cam and hid behind a speaker
stack to record everything.

(…) Video download at 43.5 megs, or watch on myspace (lower quality): Link. or if you must, youtube (still lower.): Link. For good firsthand accounts of what happened, check http://la.indymedia.org.