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.
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.