Judge Orders LAPD To Stop Shooting Journalists With Less-Lethal Weapons During Protests

A federal judge in California granted a temporary restraining order that blocks Los Angeles police officers from using rubber projectiles or other less-lethal weapons against journalists who are covering protests related to President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda.

The decision, made public on Friday, comes after the Los Angeles Press Club and investigative reporting network Status Coup filed suit in June, asking the judge to “force the LAPD to respect the constitutional and statutory rights of journalists engaged in reporting on these protests and inevitable protests to come.” The temporary restraining order, granted by US District Judge Hernán D. Vera, bars the LAPD from using things like rubber bullets, chemical irritants, and flash-bang grenades against members of the press who are not “posing a threat of imminent harm to an officer or another person,” according to the ruling.

It also prohibits officers from denying journalists access to closed areas and arresting them if they are in those areas, assaulting reporters, and otherwise obstructing those trying to gather news. The police can, according to the order, target individuals with 40-millimeter rounds “only when the officer reasonably believes that a suspect is violently resisting arrest or poses an immediate threat of violence or physical harm.”

The judge set a preliminary injunction hearing, where parties can argue the merits of the case, for July 24.

“When journalists persisted in documenting the protests, it appears from the evidence presented that they faced an onslaught of projectiles and other shows of physical force,” Vera’s ruling said. “On some occasions, LAPD officers purportedly targeted individuals who were clearly identifiable as members of the press.”

The demonstrations near Los Angeles, which are still going on, are protesting how ICE officials are invading nearly every aspect of public life in the city—from parks to churches to places of employment to schools. President Trump has consistently escalated the situation, even making the rare decision to call in the National Guard against California governor Gavin Newsom’s direction.

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Reporters Without Borders, an organization that tracks violence against press members around the world, labeled the conditions for journalism in the United States as “problematic” in their yearly World Press Freedom Index. In April, before the protests in Los Angeles, a report from the Committee to Protect Journalists found that, “Press freedom is no longer a given in the United States 100 days into President Donald Trump’s second term as journalists and newsrooms face mounting pressures that threaten their ability to report freely and the public’s right to know.”

Trump himself has called individual networks, the press, or “fake news” the “enemy of the people” tens of times. And, according to the US Press Freedom Tracker database, from the time he announced his candidacy in 2015 to early 2021, Trump posted negative comments about the media more than 2,490 times on Twitter.

The press groups’ lawsuit against LAPD accused the police of “flouting state laws passed in the wake of the 2020 protests over the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

The group that brought the case, according to Politico, “said it documented dozens of incidents in which officers forced reporters away from public spaces where protests were taking place, hit them with rubber bullets and nonlethal weapons, and exposed them to tear gas.”

In one instance, on June 8, an LAPD officer shot a New York Post photographer in the head with a rubber bullet, leaving him with a large welt on his forehead. “Fuck, fuck, I just got shot in the head!” the veteran photographer, Toby Canham, can be heard screaming from behind the camera. Another journalist, Nick Stern, had to undergo emergency surgery for a wound he sustained during the protests after an officer fired what Stern said was a three-inch “plastic bullet” into his thigh.

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In yet another instance, an LAPD officer told a CNN crew to leave the area where they were reporting and instructed them to put their hands behind their backs while they were escorted out. During the tense interaction, Jason Carroll, a reporter for the network, was briefly detained.

Los Angeles police also struck an Australian TV reporter in the leg with a rubber bullet, in another instance that went viral online. The journalist, Lauren Tomasi, a 9News correspondent, was reporting on camera when an officer behind her suddenly raised their firearm and shot her.

The federal judge, Vera, referenced this case in her ruling. “No protesters are visible near her,” Vera wrote. “Despite this, an LAPD officer appears to aim at Tomasi, hitting her leg with a rubber bullet.”

“The press weren’t accidentally hurt at the immigration protests; they were deliberately hurt,” Carol Sobel, one of the lawyers representing the journalists, said. “It’s astonishing to me that we are at the same point with LAPD over and over again.”