The tip that Charlie Kratovil received in early May was cryptic. There had been a lockdown at New Brunswick High School in New Jersey, the tipster said.
Mr. Kratovil, the editor and founder of New Brunswick Today, got to work. He called sources, sought police records and pressed for information at a New Brunswick Board of Education meeting. His reporting unearthed school surveillance video of what prompted the lockdown, footage showing security officials surrounding a 16-year-old student and confiscating what appeared to be a gun.
After additional reporting, Mr. Kratovil published the video on New Brunswick Today’s YouTube page. Interspersed among mostly mundane clips of government meetings, the video was a hit, surpassing 5,600 views in a day. Then, it vanished.
The school board’s lawyer, George F. Hendricks, had seen it. He accused Mr. Kratovil of violating the law, and demanded that the video be removed and that Mr. Kratovil reveal his source. In his 15 years of covering New Brunswick, Mr. Kratovil had often clashed with its leaders, as a journalist and as a three-time candidate for mayor. He refused to take the video down, so Mr. Hendricks sued.
“This is abhorrent,” Mr. Hendricks said at a court hearing on May 29, noting that the student’s face had not been blurred. “We have a duty to protect the privacy and security of our students, and that’s been breached here.”
The judge, Thomas D. McCloskey of New Jersey Superior Court, agreed. That day, he issued a temporary order for the video’s removal. He didn’t stop there. He barred New Brunswick Today, an online publication that is among the only outlets covering the central New Jersey city, from writing about the episode or publishing other, unrelated school security footage it might have. Judge McCloskey scheduled the next hearing for Tuesday.
In an interview, Mr. Kratovil said that he had not thought twice about his right to publish the video, saying that he had legally obtained it and was not involved in recording it. He said he did not know how his source had acquired it.
“I don’t see what purpose it serves other than to protect the school district from negative publicity and to infringe on my rights and silence me,” Mr. Kratovil said.
The judge’s ruling has alarmed press freedom organizations and First Amendment advocates, who have condemned the order as a blatantly unconstitutional example of prior restraint that prevented reporting on a newsworthy event.
In an era of eroding local news coverage and news organizations facing elevated hostility and lawsuits under President Trump, First Amendment advocates said that the decision undermines the community’s ability to know about a legitimate concern. They said they were particularly troubled that the judge barred Mr. Kratovil from writing about something that had already been made public.
The U.S. Supreme Court has never upheld the application of prior restraint against the news media. Justices have said that such an action might be justified in the rarest of circumstances — the disclosure of troop movements during wartime, for example.
“I don’t think that a security video of a high school student being detained for attempting to bring a weapon to school meets that high standard,” said Carlos A. Ball, a law professor at Rutgers University.
More than 50 years ago, the Pentagon Papers case established the near-prohibition of prior restraint. The Nixon administration had sought to block further publication of a secret government study of the Vietnam War, citing national security grounds. The landmark decision allowed publication to resume.
Still, judges since then have sometimes temporarily blocked release of news stories or ordered information to be deleted from published articles. During the past five years, 29 such rulings have been made, including three this year, according to the Freedom of the Press Foundation, an advocacy group co-founded by Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers.
“Judges across the country seem more and more inclined to grant these kinds of prior restraints,” said Caitlin Vogus, a senior adviser at the foundation. “They are always overturned.”
The lockdown at the school unfolded about an hour after classes started on May 8, when a tardy 10th grader walked through a metal detector at New Brunswick High, triggering an alarm. School security officials pressed the student against a wall and searched him, discovering a gun in his waistband.
The school alerted parents about the lockdown but called it a “security drill,” without mentioning the discovery of a weapon or the arrest of a student, according to the message obtained by The New York Times. “We routinely have school security drills as a means to prepare for a variety of emergency situations,” the message said.
In a statement, the New Brunswick Public Schools superintendent, Aubrey A. Johnson, acknowledged that the alert “could have been clearer and more accurate.”
“We have taken corrective action to strengthen our communication process,” Mr. Johnson said.
The student, whose name has not been made public because he is a juvenile, was arrested on suspicion of causing false public alarm, possession of an imitation firearm and possession of a weapon in a school, according to the New Brunswick Police Department.
Mr. Kratovil heard about the lockdown that weekend. At times, Mr. Kratovil, 40, has blurred the lines between journalist and other pursuits in a way that would be prohibited at most news organizations. He has run three times for New Brunswick mayor, including an unsuccessful bid in June, and backed a successful effort to have New Brunswick school board members be elected rather than appointed.
By his own account, Mr. Kratovil has had a fraught relationship with school leaders, who he said no longer respond to his emailed questions or return his phone calls. So, he poses questions at board meetings, including in May when he first asked Mr. Johnson about the lockdown. The superintendent said that a weapon had been found, describing it as a toy gun.
By then, Mr. Kratovil had obtained the video. He said it did not show what he considered a toy gun — identifiable by its bright orange plug in the barrel. After the meeting, Mr. Kratovil said a source told him it was an imitation firearm, which he revealed in the video’s title, “School Security Finds Replica Firearm on NBHS Student.”
In the lawsuit, the superintendent said that it was a BB gun, which, under New Jersey law, is considered a firearm. The school board’s lawyers have questioned the ethics of New Brunswick Today, calling its reporting “sensationalism at the expense of a child’s privacy” and suggesting that the video had been obtained through “apparent unauthorized means.”
“While we are committed to public transparency, we must balance this with our duty to protect minors and safeguard sensitive information,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement.
The school board asserts that New Brunswick Today violated the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, known as FERPA, and a New Jersey law on the confidentiality of juvenile records.
Bruce S. Rosen, a lawyer representing Mr. Kratovil, argued in court that the two privacy statutes do not apply to journalists and that the First Amendment protects legitimate, lawful news gathering.
Jonathan Gaston-Falk, a staff attorney at the Student Press Law Center, which defends the rights of student journalists in college and high school, said that security footage of a student is considered a confidential record protected by FERPA, which requires school districts to safeguard the information.
In an information breach, parents of juveniles — not the school system — can allege a violation in a complaint with the Department of Education, he said. The Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that individuals cannot sue over a FERPA violation.
“The fact that there was any sort of leak of this video means the school district dropped the ball,” Mr. Gaston-Falk said. “The school district would need to answer for that.”
The post A News Site Published a Video of a School Lockdown. Then It Was Gone. appeared first on New York Times.
