By Melinda Kukaj
SAN RAFAEL, CA – Homelessness is one the biggest issues California is facing, according to the First Amendment Coalition here, charging “to understand the human toll of housing insecurity and to assess the efficacy of government response, we depend on journalists to sort fact from fiction.”
But, FAC claimed in a statement this week government officials are making it difficult for reporters to cover homeless stories, “whether you view these sweeps as appropriate abatement or devastating and dehumanizing, it’s difficult to assess without a free and independent press documenting it for the record.”
The Coalition said journalists must bear witness when governments take action. This is especially relevant in regard to homeless encampments.
FAC notes that “following a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling giving government broad powers to evict homeless people and clear their belongings, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s subsequent call to action, officials across the state are cracking down on the camps set up on our streets, sidewalks, parks, and parking lots.”
FAC adds Berkeley is considering an “aggressive approach,” noting, from Silicon Valley to Santa Cruz, officials have been dismantling camps and passing new laws. And, according to FAC, Fresno passed an anti-camping ordinance that critics claim criminalizes homelessness.
However, FAC charges even reporters and photographers are facing obstacles.
According to FAC, Los Angeles journalist Lexis-Olivier Ray was among those covering sanitation workers’ cleanup of camps when he encountered LAPD officers who said he wasn’t allowed in “a secure work zone” and was threatened with arrest.
“You are going to arrest me for documenting a sanitation cleanup from a sidewalk?” Ray said to an officer. “I can safely report from here,” he tells another city worker, before ultimately retreating further away.
Another example of this, FAC reports, is when the Sacramento Bee’s Renée C. Byer and Theresa Clift covered a sweep of a large encampment, they encountered police tape cordoning off an entire city block and the threat of arrest.
“I can’t get back those missed vital images of the police storming the gate from the area I should have been allowed access to and was told I had to leave earlier that morning,” Byer said in an article in the Bee.
FAC reports that authorities’ reasoning for obstructing journalists’ access are unfounded, stating that “understandably, fears of arrest and injury in these tense moments are not overblown: The 2021 debacle at LA’s Echo Park – when a large protest broke out at a sweep and police detained and injured journalists —looms large.”
FAC is calling for Californian leaders as well as local law enforcement to do better by urging officials to respect the role of the press, as the eyes and ears of the public in moments such as these.
FAC adds that “we led a coalition of 23 press and civil liberties organizations in an open letter reminding government officials that the First Amendment guarantees the right to observe and record their actions in public, from reasonable distances.”
