Why does the Los Angeles city attorney hate the press so much she literally wants ink-stained wretches — and their contemporary multi-media cousins — shot by the police?
Why does Hydee Feldstein Soto feel so strongly that journalists need to be given brutal punishment for their apparent sins that she has been trying to stop a federal judge’s order prohibiting Los Angeles Police Department officers from targeting reporters with crowd control weapons?
These questions perhaps attempt to probe too deeply into some imagined or even real slight by the media from Feldstein Soto’s past, so who knows? One former L.A. journalist turned First Amendment-rights attorney blames the situation, rather bluntly, on Feldstein Soto being “a cop wannabe” rather than looking out for the rights of all Angelenos.
And the Los Angeles City Council feels so strongly that her anti-press bias is wrong that it issued a rare, unanimous condemnation of her opposition to the ruling against intentionally shooting reporters covering demonstrations, voting 12-0 to tell her to drop her challenge to the judge.
The whole flap comes out of this summer’s ICE raids downtown and the subsequent demonstrations against them, which were covered by reporters from all over the world. In the wake of police attacks on over a dozen journalists during the protests, the Los Angeles Press Club and the news outlet Status Coup filed suit, and included video evidence that LAPD officers violated their own longtime guidelines “by shooting journalists and others in sensitive parts of the body, such as the head, with weapons that launch projectiles the size of a mini soda can at speeds of more than 200 miles per hour,” as Libor Jany and David Zahniser report in the L.A. Times.
During this fight against the lawsuit, which merely asks the police department to follow its own policies — not to mention state law — the city attorney takes a troublesome stance on violence against reporters. Carol Sobel, the lawyer representing the plaintiffs is right with her advice for the city: “Sometimes you say: ‘Mea culpa, we were wrong. We shouldn’t have shot people in the head, despite our policies,’” she said.
Now the city attorney says in a leaked memo the real problem is that “anyone can claim they are a Journalist.” Fine. Maybe those anyones shouldn’t get shot in the head, either.