California police violate press freedom law ‘right and left’ during protests

When University of California police arrested Beckner-Carmitchel while he was filming UC police arresting students in a UCLA parking garage, that arrest violated Section 409.7, Sean’s First Amendment right to film police, and his Fourth Amendment right to be free of unlawful arrests. After I fired off a quick email to UCLA police, the school’s comms department, and the UC administration that Sean’s arrest and jailing violated Section 409.7, UCLA released him later that day. So the law worked to free Sean, but he should have never been arrested and jailed in the first place.

They also took away his cellphone, but I told UCLA that using a search warrant to search his phone would be illegal, and they gave it back within a few hours.

At the University of Southern California, the campus police and Los Angeles Police Department violated Section 409.7 earlier this month when they blocked student journalists and faculty from filming the police raid on the encampment and threatened to take away some of the students’ press passes.

However, Section 409.7 worked very well on May 15, 2024, at UC Irvine, where the press office worked closely with the local law enforcement to make sure journalists had access.

Can you explain why Section 409.7 was enacted and what it does? And tell us about any cases you’re aware of where California journalists have invoked it to try to prevent law enforcement from dispersing them from protests. Has it worked, and why or why not?

Reporters pushed for the passage of Section 409.7 after many reporters were arrested, shoved, and shot with munitions by police while covering the Black Lives Matter protests (in 2020).

Before it was passed, California law said that reporters were legally permitted to cross behind police lines during public disasters without being arrested, but it didn’t say anything about public protests where police declared an unlawful assembly and ordered everyone to disperse. So some reporters were getting arrested for failure to disperse when they were filming protests and police.

Section 409.7 says that where police “establish a police line, or rolling closure at a demonstration, march, protest, or rally where individuals are engaged in activity” protected by the First Amendment and California Constitution, a “duly authorized representative of any news service, online news service, newspaper, or radio or television station or network may enter the closed areas.” The law says that police cannot arrest reporters for “failure to disperse,” violating a curfew, or filming police.

If a reporter is arrested, the reporter has the right “to contact a supervisory officer immediately for the purpose of challenging the detention, unless circumstances make it impossible to do so.”

Section 409.7 doesn’t prevent police from “enforcing other applicable laws if the person is engaged in activity that is unlawful.”