Increased public scrutiny of American policing — through cellphone videos, social media and mass protests — has revealed in recent weeks an urgent need for sustained and systemic reform. The New York Police Department has chosen to respond by pressing ahead with new rules to grant wider latitude to bar journalists from covering official police activity.
The department’s proposed regulations would add new reasons to revoke reporters’ credentials that allow them past police lines. In a news release Wednesday, the department outlined a litany of offenses that can cost reporters their credentials, including being arrested, being perceived not to be complying with police orders or conduct that “interferes with legitimate law enforcement needs.”
The timing of the changes, in the works for years, sends a message that police officials are trying to hinder an important check on their conduct. The new rules themselves are an affront to both good government and common sense. As proposed, they are too broad and clear the way for the department to act capriciously in retaliation against the press.
The city has included journalists on the list of essential workers in the pandemic, allowing them to be on the streets even during Covid-19 lockdowns and out after curfews. In practice, however, the police have too often treated reporters as a nuisance. In New York City and beyond, reporters were a frequent target of retaliation by police officers during the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd. Journalists were pushed, bludgeoned and shuffled away as cameras rolled. In June, for instance, two Associated Press reporters were shoved and berated by officers and ordered to go home shortly after a curfew went into effect, though they were permitted to be there.
Despite those efforts, journalists still documented how the police often treated peaceful protesters more like enemy combatants. Video and news stories showed officers striking back at demonstrators with pepper spray, batons and rubber bullets.
A Police Department official noted that the proposed rule changes were drawn up before the protests following Mr. Floyd’s killing. The changes are the culmination of a lawsuit filed in 2015, when the photojournalist Jason Nicholas sued over the repeated revocation of his credentials. Mr. Nicholas said at the time that police officials tried to prevent him and other reporters from witnessing police activity by penning them in far from unfolding events and by selectively pulling their press passes, which would bar them from access.
The proposed rules are being released now for public scrutiny and comment after delays in the court system during the coronavirus pandemic, a police official said. A public hearing on them is set for next month. But the announcement and potential impact cannot be viewed out of the context of the weeks of demonstrations: Now is not the time to shield the police from the press’s watchful eye.
Even in more tranquil periods, the police have used credentials to bully reporters into compliance, threatening to revoke them on the spot for minor infractions — real or imagined.
Particularly troubling in the proposed regulations are several that grant officers too much leeway to take a reporter’s credentials. The rules govern, for instance, a reporter’s “misrepresenting the press credential” or a perceived “attempt to interfere” with police officers’ work. Such rules are written far too broadly and could easily be used to penalize journalists who are simply observing and documenting police actions.
It’s little surprise, then, that the rules quickly drew ire from other New York officials.
“Let’s revoke the NYPD’s ability to issue press credentials entirely. They’ve repeatedly proven that they are unwilling and unable to oversee a legitimate process,” Scott Stringer, the city’s comptroller, tweeted. Keith Powers, a City Council member, tweeted that he was considering legislation that would move credentialing to a new agency.
It’s time to consider more seriously the comptroller’s proposal. Revoking credentials “goes against everything we believe in,” said Mr. Stringer in an interview. “We should always side with the free press — it’s all we’ve got.”
Credentialing in 2020 is difficult enough as it is. Many journalists rely on credentials to do their jobs. Revocation can threaten that livelihood. Smaller media outlets have been sidelined by the process, particularly criteria that require clips from events where a credential is needed to cover them. Rather than sliding backward, New York can be a leader for other cities by establishing clear standards for credentialing that make arbitrary revocation more difficult.
The department is in need of immediate reform, including changing tactics and procedures that put lives in danger. But for a department also in dire need of more transparency and oversight, making it easier for police officers to punish journalists is a foreboding development.
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