Police

The San Francisco Police Department in the past 10 months has revoked several press passes previously granted to online media outlets. The department's policy has not changed; officials are simply beginning to enforce it, the department said.

However, the founder of one of the six news outlets denied renewal of their press passes, online newspaper the San Francisco Sentinel, argued that, under the police department's policy, the Sentinel should not have been denied.

Rap concert organizers did not violate a police official’s privacy when they recorded the officer’s backstage comments and included them in a DVD, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled last week.

However, the 6-1 decision in Bowens v. Ary, Inc. was a narrow one limited to the event in question and stopped short of holding that police officers have no reasonable expectation of privacy when performing their public duties.

A Florida federal judge has struck down the law that resulted in the arrest of an individual who published the contact information of a police officer in a website critique.

Police raided a California online editor’s home and seized computers and servers after he published articles about the forthcoming version of the Apple iPhone, The New York Times Media Decoder blog reported.

The U.S. Parks Police have accepted responsibility for blocking journalists from covering a protest in front of the White House staged by gay war veterans, POLITICO reported.

"That was strictly the U.S. Parks Police that screwed up – that has nothing to do with the Secret Service of the White House or the Administration," Sergeant David Schlosser told POLITICO.

A journalism professor who wrote articles about a now-exonerated teenage murder defendant during graduate school has been subpoenaed by lawyers representing Chicago police officers.

The spokesman for a North Carolina sheriff's office has filed criminal harassment charges against the editor and publisher of news@norman, a weekly newspaper, the paper reported.

A local Colorado police department has refused a television station's request for instant messages exchanged between officers, saying they do not constitute public records.

According to a memo sent to Westminster police employees, a random internal audit of the  department's internal electronic messaging system revealed that employees were sending messages containing derogatory or otherwise sexually offensive comments, sometimes about each other.

The Rhode Island legislature is considering a bill that would block release of the names of police officers who are involved in shootings until after investigations are complete.

A Michigan jury convicted a reporter of two felonies stemming from an incident that unfolded at the scene of a fatal accident involving state troopers, the Detroit Free Press reports.

Diane Bukowski of the weekly Michigan Citizen was convicted Friday of two felonies, each punishable by up to two years in prison. According to the Free Press,