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.

  • Captain Howdy@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Curious Canid
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • RGB3x3@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s what the poorly titled “Defund the Police” movement was/is about. The police serve no other purpose than to harass people and enforce the will of rich and politicians. So they need to be vastly scaled back.

      • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        So they need to be vastly scaled back.

        Unfortunately, we elected a president who pledged to raise their funding. They’re not only corrupt, violent, and out of control, they’re getting rewarded for it.

      • Curious Canid
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        1 year ago

        I don’t think they serve no other purpose, but they absolutely need to be reduced in size, responsibility, and especially in power. “Defund the Police” was not the best catchphrase for the movement, but the ideas are valid. Abuse of authority is so deeply ingrained in many departments that they probably cannot be reformed. They need to be replaced with new organizations.

        We still need organizations to protect citizens from violence and enforce the laws. Our current police only perform the second of those duties and do not do it well. Heavily armed police with paramilitary training and near immunity from the consequences of their actions are not the answer. The training needs to emphasize de-escalation. negotiation, interviewing, and investigation. These people need to be members of their communities and not an outside force of occupation.

        In the long run, we need to eliminate their special protections against prosecution. Anyone in a position of authority needs to be held to a higher standard, not a lower one. It will increase the personal risks and make the positions far less attractive, but with fewer people in them I think we will still be able to find people for the job.

  • SCB@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    While this is otherwise pretty great reporting, I found this sentence incredibly weird

    Without the devices, she was left unable to stream shows onto her TV or use devices if she needed help, the newspaper said.

    One of those things is significantly more important than the other, since she died shortly after this raid. Just a weird sentence overall.

    • fear@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Not that weird if we’re talking about the quality of life of a 98 year old woman. “Healthy” at that age might look like spending a great deal of time in your favorite chair watching your favorite shows on the television. After almost a century on this planet, you get a little tired.

  • StarServal@kbin.social
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    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.

    • Pandantic [they/them]@midwest.social
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      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”.

    • IntrovertedEO@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      A bit of cherry picking there

      But Oberlander said that exception doesn’t apply when the alleged crime is connected to newsgathering — which appears to be the case in Marion.

  • malloc@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    In America, there’s big city police. Then there is rural county police. The latter have the potential to get away with so much blatant violation of local/state/federal law. Checks and balances of power is nonexistent.

    Doesn’t help that journalists and local newspapers have either vacated the region or bought by some VC/PE or larger media organization which guts the IJ division

    • SpezBroughtMeHere@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah there’s no corruption with big city police, is there? Internal investigations always come up with accurate conclusions and big city police are always held accountable for their actions.

      • Ageroth@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        Why can’t rural police be as corrupt or more, with even less oversight? How does that make city police not corrupt? What is the internal investigation process for rural cops, especially at the county sherrif level?

      • dogslayeggs@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Reading comprehension isn’t your strong suit, is it? At no point did they say big city police weren’t corrupt. They just said that small town cops have the potential to be so much more corrupt.

  • SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org
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    1 year ago

    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”

    • fear@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.