In LA, police nightsticks are clubbing press freedom to death

The latest Los Angeles protest march against President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation arrests took off from the city’s MacArthur Park uneventfully on Friday night, which might have been just as well for a British photojournalist named Nick Stern.

Just two months earlier, Stern had been covering mayhem outside a Home Depot in the LA suburb of Paramount, the scene of arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), when, as he later recounted to the BBC, something struck him. He said there “was something hard sticking out of the back of my leg and my leg was getting wet from blood.”

That “something” turned out to be a three-inch plastic bullet, which was allegedly fired by LA County sheriff’s deputies policing the protest, and which had to be removed by surgery at a nearby hospital. But the wounded 60-year-old Stern insisted to the BBC that he would return to the sometimes chaotic streets of America’s second-largest city as soon as he healed. He said, “This is too important and it needs documenting.”

At Friday’s march, Stern’s media colleagues were thrilled to see the veteran conflict photographer back on the job for the first time, but any joy was short-lived. When the 60 or so protesters reached the federal detention center where ICE detainees are held, Homeland Security officers called the Los Angeles Police Department for backup. Soon, as shown on multiple videos, a line of LAPD cops was pushing everyone back, including journalists, and in short order, some of the officers began swinging their batons.

According to witnesses, one of the first people struck by the police was Nick Stern.

“He took a baton literally on the chin,” journalist Mel Buer, who’s been covering protests in Southern California for weeks, told me by phone Saturday. “And he came away from that bleeding.”

Adam Rose, the press rights chair of the Los Angeles Press Club, confirmed to me that Stern had been cut in the melee, but this time declined hospital care and was instead stitched up by his wife, a healthcare professional.

Stern’s newest injury was not an isolated incident. Rose, Buer, and online accounts of the protest say a couple of journalists were bloodied by police nightsticks, photographers saw their expensive cameras slammed to the pavement, and about a half dozen, including Buer, were detained at the scene by LAPD officers — their hands zip-tied — for at least an hour, maybe two.

Rose did not mince words after the violence Friday night outside the federal Metropolitan Detention Center, calling it “utter lawlessness by the LAPD” and adding, “They seemed thirsty to crack skulls.” The frustrated advocate noted that the pummeling and detentions occurred despite a 2022 California press freedom law, a federal court order against the police detaining or firing projectiles at journalists last month, and orders from the LAPD top chief that should have allowed journalists to freely cover both the protest and the police response.

And Friday’s incident was just one of many that have targeted journalists in the roughly 10 weeks since the Trump regime and ICE launched large-scale immigration raids in California. The press club’s Rose has maintained a spreadsheet that now chronicles more than 100 incidents of alleged police misconduct in this summer’s protests.

This is an element of a dramatically escalating war against the First Amendment and press freedom in an increasingly authoritarian America that needs far more attention than it’s been getting.

Since Trump — with his longtime mantra that journalists are “the enemy of the people” — returned to office in January, most of the attention has been on his efforts to either intimidate or co-opt the large traditional outlets like CBS News, NPR, or the Washington Post. They are owned by billionaires or corporations that are either inclined to back Trump or that grovel because they need government favors.

That’s made street-level journalists like Stern, Buer, and the others who’ve been assaulted or arrested — freelancers or reporters for small independent sites — more important than ever. They are arguably the truth’s last line of defense, keeping tabs on community activism right at the moment when legacy newsrooms are increasingly walking away from that function. They can’t be bought, so they are bloodied.

This isn’t only happening in Los Angeles, nor did it start with Trump’s inauguration. Arrests of working U.S. journalists doubled in 2024, amid campus protests over the carnage in Gaza, and an online press freedom tracker in the first six months of 2025 followed dozens of incidents from Georgia to Oregon, although California has had the largest number of assaults, arrests, and detentions.

“This aggression toward journalists has been a staple of Trumpist politics,” Clayton Weimers, the American director of Reporters Without Borders, wrote in a report last month. “The brutalization and detention of journalists covering anti-government protests is also common in countries such as Serbia, Turkey and Georgia.”

Yet, one thing that’s important to understand is that much of the ongoing assault against American journalists isn’t being undertaken by federal law enforcement, but by local cops or state troopers — some of them at least ostensibly under the command of reform-minded Democratic mayors or governors. Observers believe Trump’s restoration has given rank-and-file officers a permission structure to unleash brutality on both protesters and the press, divorced from bosses’ politics.

Rose, who’s long been tracking the police and press freedom in California, said hostility and misconduct by the LAPD and other units have been like a 25-year-long wildfire that subsides and then flares up at moments of stress, such as 2011’s Occupy movement or the 2020 George Floyd protests. “The Trump administration has — instead of being a fire suppressant tanker — they’ve been dropping napalm on the existing fire,” he said.

I reached out to the LAPD on Saturday by phone and then, as it requested, by email. I wanted its response specifically to the police action against journalists — especially in light of the July 11 temporary restraining order by U.S. District Judge Hernán D. Vera that bars the department from, among other things, detaining journalists while reporting. So far, the LAPD has not responded.

The LAPD did issue a statement about Friday night’s incident, including the arrest of more than a dozen protesters, which is at odds with what the journalists who were present described. According to the police account, officers cleared the area after a crowd surrounded them, struck cars, and threw objects. It said the responding unit “will continue to support 1st Amendment rights of all people. However, if violence or criminal activity occurs, laws will be enforced.”

Buer told me she’d only witnessed scenes of jubilation around 9 p.m. Friday when the MacArthur Park marchers met a small crowd staging an around-the-clock protest outside the detention center. She described “clapping and yelling and chanting, dancing, you know, really kind of a noise demonstration sort of atmosphere.” That changed abruptly after the Homeland Security agents outside the facility called in the LAPD.

“They” — the LAPD — “got heckled by the crowd and then set up a pretty haphazard skirmish line and then just right out the gate, began pushing — shoving pretty aggressively — batons in media’s faces,” Buer recounted. She said officers did not initially make an announcement that the assembly was unlawful, and seemed to ignore press passes — including a large one worn by Stern — or pleas from reporters that they had a right to cover the event. Before long, Buer said she and four others were detained by the LAPD and placed in zip ties by officers, who she said didn’t want to hear about the July court order.

“It’s a frustrating experience,” Buer said. She said independent journalists are “trying to tell the story of a resilient community that is pushing back against racial profiling and these immigration raids. And we are being obstructed from doing our jobs, and often violently so.”

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Neither Buer nor Rose was aware of any mainstream journalists — that is, reporters from the Los Angeles Times or local TV stations — who covered Friday’s violence. Rose told me that’s a sign of a much deeper problem — that these legacy newsrooms are already intimidated by the risk of violence, or by how aggressive reporting of protests might be seen in a moment of rising authoritarianism.

The Los Angeles Press Club advocate said he hears in private conversations that “newsrooms are concerned about sending their journalists out into places where they might be unsafe. And so, where these sorts of things happen, often the mainstream press has run away, which is not good. That is a chilling of constitutional rights.”

That only makes the bravery of independent journalists like Stern, Buer, and a dozen or so colleagues who’ve kept covering the LA protests when others have gone home stand out even more. They are risking their necks for a free press in America that, on too many other fronts, is surrendering without a fight.

The LA street reporters are making a bold stand for our shrinking First Amendment rights, and getting clubbed in the head for it. Yet, people continue to ignore their work, including not only too many folks in the mainstream media but also supposedly liberal politicians like Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who has not responded to the press club’s frequent pleas for help with the LAPD.

They need to understand that the violence against reporters with press passes is the uglier side of the same disease that is causing the bigger high-profile newsrooms to capitulate — a tyrannical push to crush what remains of journalistic freedom in America. Because just imagine how the cops will act when the reporters and cameras are finally no longer there.

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