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Since the violence of last October 7—as the conflict between Israel and Palestine has grown deadlier, and spread more widely in the Middle East—it has also been, according to the US Press Freedom Tracker, a nonpartisan database of press freedom violations, a “protest year.” The visual journalists who cover demonstrations across America—photographers, videographers—are at the center of the action. “We have to get creative, go on the floor, shoot through cops’ legs, just to get that visual,” Madison Swart—a photojournalist in New York whose work has been published in Out and Cosmopolitan, among other places—told me. In May, while covering a pro-Palestinian protest, Swart was briefly detained by police officers—one of forty-three journalists who have been arrested in the past year, triple the previous number. According to Stephanie Sugars, a reporter for the US Press Freedom Tracker, “it has felt that the predominant number of incidents, at least since the protests started, are against people who are documenting visually in some capacity.”
In Swart’s case, she’d been following protesters making their way from Brooklyn to Manhattan, who had splintered into groups as police made arrests. Swart wound up among a crowd of about a hundred crossing the Manhattan Bridge. She had a bad feeling about what might happen on the other side, but she was with a colleague, and both were wearing visible press badges; she figured she could get a few shots before running into trouble. Then an officer approached; she identified herself as a journalist. “You’re not allowed to be here,” he said, as he placed one of her hands in cuffs. Then he seemed to change his mind—though before she was released, Swart was led by officers down the bridge. She left with a strong impression: “There is an aspect of them not wanting to let us document them arresting people,” she told me, “because the first thing that happens when they go to arrest someone is they create a little circle, and they make sure that they’re standing tight-knit, and they don’t want the photographers to be able to get an angle in.” (The New York Police Department did not respond to requests for comment.)
Some have dealt with charges well after a protest ends—an unusual recent phenomenon, the Tracker shows. Samuel Seligson, a videographer who has sold footage to Reuters and ABC News, tangled with law enforcement twice in the past year. In May, he was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, obstruction of government administration, and resisting arrest; the charges were dropped in August. In June, he covered a pro-Palestinian demonstration at the home of the Brooklyn Museum’s director, where protesters sprayed red paint and hung a banner. Several weeks later, Seligson was charged with eight counts of criminal mischief, six of them with a “hate crime enhancement,” a distinction that comes with a higher likelihood of jail time if he is convicted. (The case is still pending.) In Oregon, Alissa Azar—an independent journalist who documents protests on social media to tens of thousands of followers—was recently prosecuted over her presence at a demonstration that took place three years ago, involving a clash with Proud Boys at an Oregon City park. In September, Azar was sentenced to two weeks in jail and three years of probation. “It is very rare to have actual time attached to a sentence,” Sugars said. The Tracker, started in 2017, counts only three other instances in its history.
The Tracker has also logged a more than 50 percent increase over the past year in journalist assaults, the vast majority of them at Gaza-related protests, half—the largest portion—from law enforcement. “It’s largely the photographers who face the violence,” Robert Balin, a media lawyer, told me. Balin has represented several photojournalists, including in a case involving five freelancers who were arrested and assaulted by NYPD officers while covering protests against the murder of George Floyd. A settlement was reached, which required the department to train officers on how to interact with the press.
But the problem is far-reaching. This past August, at the Democratic convention, in Chicago, where pro-Palestinian demonstrations took place outside, some journalists faced a hostile reception: Tina-Desiree Berg—a photojournalist from Los Angeles whose work appears on Democracy Now! and has been licensed to local Fox and CBS stations—was perched on a planter, filming protesters from behind a bush, when a police officer came up from behind and pulled her to the ground. Later, a supervisory officer asked Berg to show him her press credentials and said he would revoke them. She objected—successfully—citing her First Amendment rights. But she saw other, similar exchanges over the course of the week. “A couple of times I saw police officers literally walking up to people and revoking their press credentials,” she said, “ripping them off their chests.” Complaints piled up. At a news conference, Larry Snelling, the superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, said, “We want to allow you to do your jobs. We really do. But there are times—when we’re calling a mass arrest or we’re attempting to move in—we need you guys to step to the side.”
Photographers’ equipment is vulnerable, too. Josh Pacheco—a photographer in New York whose images appear in the New York Times, PBS, and elsewhere—said that law enforcement seized their camera and caused damage. Repairs surpassed a thousand dollars, Pacheco told me; according to the Tracker, the amount can run even higher, sometimes putting visual journalists out of work indefinitely. The process of dealing with police can have the same effect. Sugars has observed a “new mode of handling arrests,” more common this year, through which journalists are given an opportunity to have their charges dropped if they don’t get arrested again. That puts them in a bind. “If what you were arrested and charged with doing was your job—being in the streets so you could take a photograph of police violently arresting a protester or something—where they accuse you of disorderly conduct or obstruction of the peace, that can absolutely have a chilling effect on the journalist,” she said.
One of the most frequently cited reasons for arresting journalists at protests is unlawful assembly––the offense invoked when police are dispersing a crowd. Journalists are typically exempt, but this year, that has seemed to matter less and less. “Police seem to not really have much respect for the work that we do,” Swart said, “and they don’t seem to really care about differentiating us from the protests, from the protesters.”
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