Police

One of a citizen's most valuable tools in his local community is oversight on government activity -- learning what public officials do on behalf of the community and holding those officials accountable for their actions.

A new Baltimore Police Department policy will end citizens' rights to learn the names of officers who kill or injure people, eviscerating their oversight on some of the gravest matters in local, internal policing.

 A Newark, N.J. police officer was suspended Monday after he arrested and physically restrained a news cameraman, The Associated Press reported.

Local CBS cameraman Jim Quodomine was covering an anti-violence rally on Sunday when he was arrested for disorderly conduct. Once he had been detained, video shows Officer Brian Sharif putting Quodomine in a choke hold, The AP said.

The Louisiana Supreme Court heard arguments Monday in an open-records dispute over documents from a state investigation into the highly publicized post-Hurricane Katrina deaths of patients at Memorial Medical Center.

More news about journalists arrested while covering Monday's protests outside the Republican National Convention: Radio host Amy Goodman pressed the St. Paul police chief at a press conference Tuesday for an accounting of her detainment, while two University of Kentucky journalism students and a photo adviser were expected to spend a second night sitting in jail awaiting riot charges. 

A New Hampshire man's defamation suit against a local newspaper that in 1999 quoted police linking him to "more than 1,000 crimes" was dismissed late last month, with the court finding the officers' statements fell under a qualified privilege -- and so did The (Nashua) Telegraph in publishing them.

On behalf of three Flint, Mich. police officers who say they were punished for breaching an agency rule barring them from speaking to the media, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit this week seeking to have the ban thrown out, The Flint Journal reports.

According to WNEM news, Chief David Dicks imposed the order prohibiting officers from speaking with reporters.

An ABC producer was arrested Wednesday while trying to film Democratic officials and corporate donors from a sidewalk outside a Denver hotel, the network said.

The Kentucky Attorney General this summer sided with Eastern Kentucky University's Progress student newspaper, deciding it should have access to university police reports free from widespread redactions. The attorney general's opinion, in response to a filing earlier this year by the paper, said the university police department was misusing Kentucky law intended to protect privacy interests to over-censor its reports.

Don't want to speak too soon, but on this last day of the Democratic National Convention it seems the events in Denver have unfolded minus the tense drama of waves of journalists swept into masses of detained protesters that marked the 2004 convention in New York City.

Indeed, the Reporters Committee hotline -- staffed in Denver by the law firm Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz, L.L.P., to provide journalists with free legal assistance -- has recorded exactly zero calls so far.

A Tennessee Highway Patrol officer apparently ran an unauthorized background check on a reporter who had written about ongoing agency woes, The (Nashville)Tennessean said.