In the In Times Past column, David W. Dunlap explores New York Times history through artifacts housed in the Museum at The Times.
Rubber bullets may not be lethal. But they certainly aren’t harmless. Look at what hit the reporter Anthony DePalma of The New York Times. Pictured above, it’s a three-ounce, four-inch-long projectile hard enough to crack a bone.
Mr. DePalma was in Quebec on April 20, 2001, covering protests outside a summit at which President George W. Bush was advocating free trade policies. In an email this month, Mr. DePalma said he positioned himself between the police and demonstrators, believing the large press pass on his chest would protect him. It didn’t.
The police fired nonlethal weapons. “Though I was crouching, I was hit in the stomach, just below my press credentials, knocking the breath out of me,” Mr. DePalma wrote. “I didn’t immediately connect the sound of the guns with the pain in my groin. I staggered back a step or two and looked down on the asphalt and was surprised (and relieved) to see that what had hit me was a rubber bullet.
“I scooped it up as I retreated behind a line of parked automobiles and caught my breath,” Mr. DePalma wrote. Undeterred, he filed an account of the skirmish. This month, he gave the bullet to the Museum at The Times.
Mr. DePalma is not the only journalist working for The Times who has been hit by a rubber bullet. On Aug. 25, 2020, Alyssa Schukar, a freelance photographer, was on assignment for The Times in Kenosha, Wis., covering a protest over the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, by a white police officer.
“Ms. Schukar was holding her camera in front of her with one hand near her mid-section,” David McCraw, the deputy general counsel of The Times, wrote in a letter of protest to the Kenosha County sheriff on Oct. 12, 2020. “Without provocation, but with clear intent, one or more of the law enforcement officers fired at the journalists.” Ms. Schukar was struck in her left hand.
She and another photojournalist sued law enforcement authorities in 2023, asserting that the shootings had violated their civil rights. Ms. Schukar wrote in an email last week that she is currently waiting for the court to rule on the defendants’ motion for summary judgment.
“My left index finger, where I was struck, has never returned to full function,” she wrote. “I notice its limitations and scars every day, but I continue to work as a photographer — and hope that law enforcement agencies will move away from using ‘less lethal’ weapons.”
David W. Dunlap, a retired Times reporter and columnist, is the curator of the Museum at The Times, which houses Times artifacts and historical documents.
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