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Last week the Los Angeles Press Club and investigative reporting network Status Coup secured a preliminary injunction from a federal judge that orders the Los Angeles Police Department to not interfere with journalists’ right to cover protests, which includes documenting the LAPD’s response to the protests. You can read the court order can be found here.
That order included steps the LAPD needed to take to show they are complying with the law. One is to “notify all sworn officers of the court’s issuance of the preliminary injunction within 72 hours and within this period provide a summary of the court’s findings and the specific provisions set out in the first six provisions of this preliminary Injunction.”
The LA Reporter received a copy of the Sept. 12 notice, which you can read it here.
LAPD officers being sent into protests will need to show they’ve read this document, according to the notice, which state “all sworn personnel are required to read and acknowledge the receipt of this notice in the Learning Management System (LMS), and shall not be deployed in response to any protest if they have not acknowledged review of this notice.”
The notice also says that if a journalist gets detained or arrested, “that person shall be permitted to promptly contact a captain or above by either connecting them with a Captain at scene or calling the DOC for the on-call commanding officer assigned to the area of protest, unless circumstances make it impossible to do so.”
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